The Caller

Victoria is held captive by a past lunatic.

"Some calls are best left unanswered."

Like the call to be in a Twilight movie or two for instance! Welcome to another gripping edition of The Tagline! Today I'll be talking about The Caller, a film that somehow merges horror, being stalked, time-manipulation and land-line telephone service. Starring the bountifully tressed Rachelle Lafevre (who was Victoria in the first two Twilight movies, but NOT the third) as Mary Kee, a woman who is attempting to escape her abusive husband who she is trying to divorce. She moves into a new apartment and finds an antique phone which she decides to use. Around that time she begins to receive phone calls from a clearly crazy lady named Rose. What's really freaky though is that Rose is apparently from the past. Rose seems to be calling from somewhere in the 70s or thereabouts, and despite Mary's attempts to stop the calls, Rose just keeps on a'callin. This only adds to Mary's problems, because her ex-psycho is stalking her. Fortunately she meets John (Stephen Moyer, who most notably portrays Bill Compton on the series True Blood), who is a really nice guy. Things might turn around for Mary, right? not likely.

NO I WONT BE IN ECLIPSE! LEAVE ME ALONE.

Setting aside the number of vampire actors not portraying vampires in this movie, I found the premise to be very interesting. It isn't really easy to make a horror movie where the central mechanic of the suspense is a telephone sending calls from the past to you. It's an interesting way to achieve something that I'd talked about before when discussing horror. One of the best ways to create a sense of horror is to create a situation where the character is trapped. Mary is doubly trapped. First she is trapped by the stalking of her ex, and later, after that issue is addressed, she is trapped more completely by a person tormenting her from the past. Why is that so bad? Well Mary unfortunately grew up in the area near where the movie takes place.

"Soookeh, this is not your intro French class

That puts Mary in a pretty bad position when crazy Rose finds her teeny tiny self and kidnaps her. Of course, Rose works her way up to that point, first preying upon other people that Mary knew. This introduces a really interesting dynamic, because really how do you stop someone from maiming and murdering you when they're doing it in the past? If you watch the movie through until the end, you'll find out the not very good solution Mary came to!

Me on any given Friday night.

The ending of the movie was probably the weakest part, as I felt like it was sort of.. ambiguous. Not in the "oooh what happened REALLLYY" kind of way, but rather in the "Well I guess the movie's over so I'm done trying to explain things," sort of way. It wasn't terrible, but I feel like it could have been handled better. I definitely think it's worth watching, and it IS on Netflix, so if you subscribe check it out. The premise is novel if nothing else, so you should consider it!

That's all for today, I'll see y'all next week!