The Call (2020)

The Call arrives from South Korea with a cordless phone, a time paradox, and the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is. Two women, Seo-yeon in 2019 and Young-sook in 1999, share a house and a telephone line across twenty years. What follows is a psychological thriller of escalating cruelty, in which every act of mercy ripples backward into fresh catastrophe. The premise is elegant. The execution is merciless. We are watching a story about the impossibility of saving anyone, including yourself.

There is, to be fair, a genuine current of social critique running beneath the horror. The film concerns itself almost entirely with women trapped by domineering and abusive mothers, and it grants both leads the agency to resist, to scheme, and to destroy. That is a recognizable feminist preoccupation with domestic power and inherited trauma, and it earns the film a measure of cultural seriousness. The film declines, however, to build a sermon on that foundation. It is interested in the knife, not the thesis.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. The cast is Korean, which is a baseline of visibility and little more, since the story has no interest in ethnicity as a subject. There is no queer subtext, no climate anxiety, no assault on capital, no meditation on body image. The keywords gesture at psychopathy and borderline personality disorder, but the film treats these as plot mechanics, not as an invitation to educate anyone. Nobody stands before the camera to explain the audience to itself. What we get instead is a thriller that trusts its own dread, and we are left to file it away, as we file away everything, with a certain professional weariness.