Call, The (2020) Review

“The Call” Korean Theatrical Poster

Director: Lee Choong-Hyun
Writer: Lee Choong-Hyun
Cast: Park Shin-Hye, Jun Jong-Seo, Kim Sung-Ryoung, Lee El, Park Ho-San, Lee Dong-Hwi
Running Time: 114 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Korean cinema has had a longstanding fascination with the concept of two characters interacting with each other from different moments in time. From the 2000 Korean Wave classic Il Mare, which sees a love story play out between a man and a woman living in the same house 2 years apart (and was lamentably remade by Hollywood into 2006’s The Lake House), to 2015’s The Phone, which has a lawyer receiving a call from his wife a year on from the day she was murdered. In 2020 the genre has another title to add to its ranks in the form of The Call, the debut full length feature of director Lee Chung-hyun.

Similar to The Phone, Chung-hyun opts to use the plot device within the framework of a thriller, although The Call differentiates itself by also incorporating a strong undercurrent of horror. Following the trend of recent Korean productions such as 2017’s The Vanished and 2018’s Door Lock, The Call is a remake of the 2011 British/Puerto Rican co-production The Caller. Thankfully the component being remade is only the concept of the phone call between two characters taking place years apart from each other, with Chung-hyun crafting a distinctly different plot than the movie on which it’s based on.

We’re introduced to a character in their late twenties played by Park Shin-hye (#Alive, Heart Blackened), who we meet returning to her empty childhood home in the Korean countryside, learning that her mother is hospitalised with a terminal illness. Shin-hye doesn’t hold much love for her mother though, carrying the scars of a fire that resulted from a gas stove being left on when she was still a child, and the subsequent death of her father because of it.

To make matters worse, Shin-hye left her mobile on the train, so has to resort to digging out an old house phone and plugging it into the landline. While attempting to call her mobile to retrieve it from some opportunistic youths who’ve taken it, mysterious calls start coming through from a distraught woman, in a frantic panic that she’s going to be killed by her stepmother and begging for help. The more the calls come through, the more Shin-hye begins to research online about who the mystery caller could be, and comes to believe that it’s a woman who lived there 20 years ago with her stepmother who was a shaman.

Like both Il Mare and The Phone, The Call doesn’t worry itself with providing a logical explanation as to why a pair of characters are able to call each other from several years apart (although guesses are certainly invited), it’s a plot device and it does what it’s intended to do. Chung-hyun banks on the audience accepting it, and like in the other productions that also use the setup, it’s essentially there as a catalyst to build the events of the narrative around. The woman at the end of the line is played by Jeon Jong-seo, here clocking in her 2^nd role after a powerhouse debut in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning in 2018.

Jong-seo suffers greatly at the hands of her shaman stepmother, played by Lee El (Inside Men, Man on High Heels), who believes she was born cursed and will only bring harm to those she crosses paths with if she carries on living. Resorting to staying out of sight in her room, Jong-seo and Shin-hye gradually begin to bond, as Shin-hye brings her up to speed with things like smart phones and what Korean rocker Seo Taiji (look him up!) has been up to in the 20 years between them. Things begin to get interesting when the 8-year-old Shin-hye visits the house with her family, who are looking to buy the property, at the same time as the pair are talking to each other on the phone. Jong-seo suggests that she could attempt to stop Shin-hye’s father from being killed, so sneaks out of the house and follows the family home, changing the course of time and dragging Shin-hye in the present into a different timeline where her father is now alive.

It’s at this point that The Call begins to make its true intentions clear, and while it may share DNA on the surface with its previously mentioned contemporaries, it soon becomes apparent that its closest comparison point is actually 2004’s The Butterfly Effect. Shin-hye becomes enamoured with the fact she has her family back, and as a result finds herself picking up the phone less and less, which begins to rub Jong-seo up the wrong way, leading to her becoming increasingly spiteful and frustrated. Realising their phone connection allows her to alter both Shin-hye’s and her own future, Jong-seo sets upon an increasingly dark path, as each decision she makes impacts both of their lives, bringing them closer and closer together in the present day.

Like most movies that deal with the impact of time being altered, think about The Call deeply enough and there’ll be plenty of questionable jumps in logic, however Chung-hyun displays a remarkably assured hand as a first time director, and keeps it all flowing onscreen in a way which makes sense. The initial juxtaposition between Shin-hye’s life at the beginning, and the switch to when she has both of her parents back suffers from the latter feeling a little too idyllic to feel real, but like any good horror movie, the main purpose of these scenes is to send everything straight to hell soon afterwards. The Call is best watched not knowing too much about it going in (which includes not watching the trailer), as the real enjoyment of it comes from watching Jong-seo fulfil her stepmothers’ prophecy, becoming more and more unhinged as the plot progresses.

Like her performance in Burning, Jong-seo captivates the screen when she’s on it, able to convey a certain oddness that gradually transitions to something more menacing, but what exactly it is remains elusive. If anything, one of the issues, albeit a minor one, is that comparatively Shin-hye is relatively vanilla and plain in comparison, there mainly to react to each change in time rather than feeling like a fully fleshed out character. Despite the criticism, she effectively conveys the horror of having her reality messed with by an outside force that’s beyond her control, and The Call makes an effective transition from those initial harmless phone conversations into increasingly bloody and uncomfortable territory.

The more Jong-seo turns from victim to antagonist, the more relentlessly tense The Call becomes, and it’s a thrilling ride which is never less than engaging. While never overtly graphic, there are a handful of moments that act as reminders to how Asian cinema has always been willing to go places Hollywood would never dare, which is likely why many of us got into these movies in the first place. Characters meet their end in some unexpected circumstances, and Chung-hyun does a great job of invoking an atmosphere in which no one feels safe. If any criticism could be had apart from the required suspensions of disbelief when dealing with such a concept, it’s towards Chung-hyun’s decision to insert a mid-end credits final twist, providing a satisfying but cynical twist that likely not all audiences will be fond of. 

The question of what we’d change if we could go back in time is one which has been asked throughout the ages, and like many productions that have tackled it in the past, The Call makes an effective case as to why we should leave things alone. That part may be predictable, but onscreen there’s nothing predictable about the journey which is taken to reach the conclusion, with Chung-hyun clearly having fun with the concept which is anchored by a pair of stellar performances from Shin-hye and Jong-seo. An entertaining debut that takes a familiar concept, and gives it a fresh perspective through framing it as an increasingly fraught horror, The Call owes a lot to Jong-seo’s edgy performance, but also marks Chung-hyun as a director to keep an eye on.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8/10