The Call (2013)

The Call is a 2013 crime thriller in which Halle Berry plays Jordan Turner, a 9-1-1 operator, and Abigail Breslin plays Casey Welson, a teenager locked in the trunk of a kidnapper's car. Berry headlines, Morris Chestnut appears as her police-officer boyfriend, and the principal cast is notably diverse for a mainstream thriller of its era. Race is never remarked upon. The film simply places a Black woman at the center of a procedural and lets her work the phones. That is a form of representation casting, though it arrives without a speech, a lesson, or a knowing glance at the audience.

On the feminist front, the film has a clearer pulse. The screenwriter chose two female leads because he wanted strong women, and Berry framed the role as empowering. The climax has Jordan and Casey jointly take vigilante justice, taping the killer to the chair he used for torture and leaving him to die. This is empowerment delivered through genre mechanics: phone traces, tail lights, paint, a wheelchair, a pair of scissors. The film never pauses to explain its politics. It just lets the women win in the ugliest available way. That keeps the sermonizing at zero, which is a mercy.

The rest of the cultural ledger is blank. It has no interest in sermonizing about identity, environment, economics, body image, history, or mental health. The killer is a disturbed psychopath, a stock figure whose illness is used for horror, not for neurodivergent dignity. The film is a lean abduction thriller, and it has no interest in being a seminar. It became the most commercially successful WWE Studios production, which is its own deadpan punchline. The Call wants to tighten your chest for ninety-four minutes, and it does. It does not want to improve you. That restraint is almost old-fashioned.