Halle Berry Leads A Captivating and Pulsating, Albeit Morally Ambiguous Thriller With The Call

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As a 911 operator, veteran Jordan Turner is the one difference between someone living and someone dying. Contemplate that notion for a moment. Millions of lives in your hands, lives depending on your actions, your immediate response to their crisis. After years of hard-work Jordan (played by Halle Berry) makes a vital mistake resulting in the death of a young teenage girl.

This is the prelude to The Call – an absolutely terrifying, yet entirely involving introduction to the movie. Director Brad Anderson grabs our attention from the beginning, and only proceeds to lose it in the final 25-minutes of this equal parts gut-wrenching and infuriating thriller.

After her traumatic experience, Jordan begins to mentally and psychologically recoil. The film then skips six months in time where she is now training operators to complete the job she used to love. Naturally, for the sake of cinema, The Call pits our hard-nosed protagonist in a situation where she must confront her fears and her past.

Upon a frantic 911 call a new operator can’t handle, Jordan intervenes in hopes of saving yet another young girl who has just been abducted. The methodical abductor, played appropriately menacing by Michael Eklund, has an unsettling (perhaps incestual) festish for unassuming, blonde teenage girls (making Casey, played by Abigail Breslin, the perfect victim).

In order for The Call to sustain our interest Anderson interweaves stomach-turning close-up shots of the victim stuck in the trunk, with Jordan doing all she can over the phone to help this young girl. The film effectively captures that sort of helplessness every 911 operator must feel on a daily basis.

For an ostensibly by-the-numbers Hollywood produced thriller, The Call employs more creativity than expected. Alas, Anderson’s dexterous camerawork and a plethora of emotionally effective performances can’t save the film’s downright deplorable final act.

Although I’m inclined to deconstruct the logic-leaping construction of The Call scene by scene, I won’t for the sake of time and ruining the movie.

Still, a few gaffs worthy of your attention: the LAPD as depicted in the film are as so remarkably incompetent and inept that you’d think Los Angeles employed a gaggle of third-graders who just watched NCIS: Every City Ever for the first time and thought being a cop would be a fun career path.

But what’s most problematic is how the film decides to conclude. Our leading lady suddenly transforms into Nancy Drew, ultimate detective ready to take the law (the same law she was previously committed to upholding) into her own hands. It’s a morally ambiguous ending so sickening that I began to question who would produce such a product?

Everything came full circle as I found out who was behind The Call: WWE Productions. I suppose cheap and vacuous productions run in the family.