The caller
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The caller |
| Original title | The caller |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1987 |
| length | 93 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Arthur Allan Seidelman |
| script | Michael Sloan |
| production | Frank Yablans |
| music | Richard Band |
| camera | Daniele Nannuzzi |
| cut | Bert Glatstein |
| occupation | |
| |
The Caller is an American mystery thriller directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman from 1987. The film was shot in Rome . Seidelman was nominated in 1987 for a prize at the Mystfest festival .
action
A woman is observed from a telephone booth by a mysterious stranger as she gets into her SUV after shopping and drives home, which is isolated in a forest. On the way there, she finds an abandoned, broken down Ford Thunderbird . When she takes a closer look at it and curiously opens the glove compartment, she finds a doll in it whose head and limbs have been torn out and which she seems to know.
When she arrives home and night falls, there is a knock on her door. A stranger stands in front of her and asks to be allowed to make a phone call because his car has allegedly broken down. It is the owner of the Thunderbird. While waiting for the towing service, the visitor asks about her private life. While she is preparing everything for herself and her boyfriend, whom she is expecting to eat, she tells him that her husband died in the war and that her daughter is visiting friends, which her mysterious interlocutor seems to doubt.
From then on a psycho-duel that lasts for days begins, the sole purpose of which seems to be to elicit contradictions from the uncanny stranger, for each of which she receives an imaginary game point. On the third day she seems to have won the game, as she scored almost fifty points, but suddenly the situation escalates when he tells her that he had to kill her boyfriend because he allegedly fled before the game was over. She takes a crossbow and shoots an arrow at him, whereupon he clings to the cable of the ceiling lamp and is slowly killed by the current. During his death his body crumbles and it turns out that he is not a human being at all, but one of countless callers, visitors to a strange world.
This does not seem to have been the first caller to visit her as she asks how many of him there would be and where her daughter is and he explains that she was hidden within a power field just six miles from the house would. Then she runs into the forest and hears her daughter's voice a few times, but doesn't find it because she gives up. Suddenly a new caller appears, in the same guise as the victim and who tells her not to commit any mistakes like his predecessor, who fell in love with her during the game. He asks them to play the game again, in which he and his fellow species force them and thousands of other people to live separately from their children in the wild as part of an experiment that is supposed to explore their human feelings. Only if they win the points game that starts over and over again will they get their freedom and their children back. Finally she gives in and returns to her house, whereupon a new caller, this time in the form of a police officer, shows up to start a new game.
criticism
“A mysterious stranger nests with a young woman who lives all alone in her big house in the forest. The two watch each other until, at the end of a tiring game of cat and mouse, it turns out that the visitor belongs to an extraterrestrial form of life that keeps people prisoner in solitary confinement and terrorizes them with psychological tests. This far-fetched punchline is preceded by a dreary, prepared fiddling with empty allusions and symbols. "
"Tough psycho duel with a surprising punchline"
Web links
- The Caller in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Caller. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Film review at Cinema.de