Don't Hang Up (2016)

Don't Hang Up arrives from 2016 with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is: a home-invasion thriller in which two young men make rude phone calls and are punished for it by a stranger with a surveillance van. The cast is white, the suburb is anonymous, and the moral universe is the one horror has always kept in stock. Bad manners invite bad ends. No larger argument is being made, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

The women in the story, Peyton and Mrs. Kolbein, exist to be threatened, captured, or shot, and the screenplay never asks us to consider them as anything more. Race goes unmentioned in a film whose antagonist is driven by personal grief, not by any grievance against a system. The economy is not critiqued, the climate is not consulted, and no character pauses to educate anyone about anything. The revenge plot is domestic and small, which is to say it is a revenge plot.

The film offers instead a competence of a modest order. The twist, in which the hero stabs what he believes to be his captor and finds his friend instead, is a decent piece of nastiness, and the killer's motive, a prank that led to a dead child and a suicide, lands with the dull weight of a cautionary tale told by someone who has not thought about it much. Rotten Tomatoes sits at twenty-five percent. The film earns that number without shame and without sermon. It is not trying to improve anyone. It is trying to make them flinch, and it succeeds about a quarter of the time.