The Caller

Not a bad watch overall. Tense in moments. Most viewers will dislike this movie because it spends around an hour showing the protagonist taking her customer service calls. And this is a fair criticism. It felt like viewers were undergoing training watching her. I'm a bit different though. I personally enjoy looking out for layman moments in movies. So while I agree that the runtime could have been better fleshed out with actual plot points, I am not marking down the movie as much as others might based on this alone. My guess is the director either wasn't confident in his ability to make good action sequences, or he was trying to go for a slow burn psychological thriller. Either way, a more balanced use of the runtime would have been better. My criticism stems mainly from other things. The most jarring was the horrendous sound and lighting. Couldn't make out the dialogue at times, and the fight/cat-and-mouse scenes were in parts indiscernible. On that note, I thought the action was quite badly choreographed. Not to mention the highly implausible ending.

Worst film I have seen in a long time and I watch a lot of films. The film consists of over an hour of a girl carrying out her customer service job on a banking helpline and subjects us to phonecall after phonecall from customers. It's only a 98 minute film but 70 minutes pass with nothing really happening. It felt like I had done an 8 hourshift working in a call centre myself! The dialogue and acting is poor. Don't waste your time watching this film. It was a good enough idea and could have been better if there was some sort of action before we were 5 minutes away from the end credits. If I hadn't paid for it, I would have switched it off.

source: The Caller

While working from home, a woman going through the routines as a call-center operator for a large bank is threatened and targeted by a vicious customer and tries to ignore it only to believe that he's found her and tracked her down to her house which puts her life in great danger. Overall, this is a pretty solid suspense/thriller that has a lot going for it. The central premise is quite chilling with the idea of the anonymous figure on the other end of the line providing a series of clues among their threats that they know who you are and where you live despite the promise of anonymity. This sets her off into a fine spiral of thrills and chills as her already frazzled mindset that comes from how the interaction started on the job that then goes towards the more dangerous once it's established he's followed her. This is all paid off nicely with the finale where the cat-and-mouse stalking gives this a bit of intriguing action and confrontations in the house that have some surprises in store, making for an overall fun time here. Where the film gets held up is the slightly overlong running time where it spends quite a lot of time on the mundane qualities of her job to the detriment of the stalking angle. While it's good to know that her job is still being performed even after the targeted call, the fact that so much of the running time here consists of her sitting around at a computer clacking away on her screens answering the same type of questions over and over again makes the film feel somewhat overlong and redundant. Some of these repetitive moments could've been trimmed down or changed into a different type of consumer issue to go through which could've changed it up slightly. It's not a big issue but it's what holds this down the most. Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.