The Calling (2000)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The calling |
| Original title | The calling |
| Country of production | USA , Germany |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2000 |
| length | 89 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Richard Caesar |
| script |
John Rice Rudy Gaines |
| production | Bernd Eichinger |
| music |
Christopher Franke Dean Landon Edgar Rothermich |
| camera | Joachim Berc |
| cut | Alexander Berner |
| occupation | |
| |
The Calling is a horror film produced by Bernd Eichinger and directed by Richard Caesar from the year 2000, which was a German-American co-production. The film tells the story of a boy with demonic abilities.
action
Kristie St. Clair already had a bad feeling on her wedding night. Marc, whom she only met 8 months before, leads her to an eerie place. Despite her discomfort, he has sexual intercourse with her, which leads to pregnancy. The time is right, it is a full moon, he said. Kristie gives birth to a son, Dylan, and the first eight years of his life are happy. But then strange things happen. Among other things, Dylan takes pleasure in causing harm to people and pets around him.
A family friend, Elizabeth Plummer, persuades Kristie to take a stressful job at her media company that occasionally separates her from her family through business trips. For example, she has to spend Christmas Eve alone in a London hotel room. At the same time, husband Marc and Elizabeth, who turns out to be his lover, perform a painful ritual on Dylan that will be of immense importance for the rest of his life. Kristie senses something is wrong.
On the way home, the taxi driver Carmac announces to her that Dylan was conceived by the devil and that a new ruler is growing in him, whose call will one day be followed by thousands and thousands of disciples. Kristie doesn't believe what he says. The fact that Dylan has injuries on both hands after her return and shows a talent for talking backwards strikes her as scary. Carmac's myths seem to be coming true. Kristie wants to save her son with a baptism . In a night and fog action, she kidnaps her son into a church, places him on the altar and wets him with holy water. He screams terribly. Marc appears with the police and prevents anything else. Kristie now thinks everyone in town is crazy and Marc moves in with Dylan to live with Elizabeth.
When Kristie is about to move out of the common house, she finds the earring of her friend who was murdered at Christmas time. Now she has no more doubts that evil is going on in her family. Carmac has only one solution: the inversion of the holy sacrament of baptism. That means Kristie has to drown her son. Carmac and Kristie kidnap the sleeping boy from Elizabeth's house and take him to the nearby seashore. Kristie presses her son underwater for minutes, torn between motherly love and killing mania. With Carmac's help, the endeavor succeeds.
During Dylan's funeral, the sky closes and a storm comes up. The funeral is being televised and Kristie, who is now in the hospital, sees that Carmac is among the mourners. Carmac bares his chest and from his scars Kristie realizes that he was there on their wedding night and must therefore be the devil. As the roar subsided, the mourners heard a knocking noise from Dylan's coffin. Dylan is alive. After explaining to the bystanders how much he loved his mother despite everything, he used his telekinetic skills and, through mere eye contact, ordered a police officer to kill Kristie in the hospital. But she is already on the run with a priest who lost her faith due to the events.
background
The film was shot in the English county of Cornwall and the British capital London .
Worldwide cinema release was on December 21, 2000 in Germany. Video and DVD sales began on July 26, 2001.
Reviews
"Unoriginal horror film that works on relevant models, but only strings together trivialities without taking the genre and its rules seriously."
"Above all, critics complained about the naivety of the main actress, but praised the unpredictability of the end."
“Actually a really well structured script. It has a few twists and turns, and without any special effects it knows how to create tension and a lot of atmosphere. The film was certainly not staged very lavishly, but it presents the best "Son of Satan" story since "THE OMEN" to date. [...] But it is certainly not a milestone in horror films. "
“This film manages to pretend, with a grave grave expression, as if Rosemary's baby and all the other Children of Satan films never existed. The overload of upturned crosses, flickering candles, and black ravens doesn't make the whole thing any more subtle or interesting, either. These set pieces from a hundred previous films are put together with enthusiasm, as if they had just fallen from the sky. And if you haven't collapsed under the weight of the religious and occult symbols, everything will be explained again in detail by a squeaky television commentator. The camera, too, sinks into squiggly, baroque-looking images and, despite all the detail shots and parallel montages, fails in an attempt to disguise the all too obvious a little. In fact, it's not even the most annoying thing to be thought stupid by this movie; worse is the consequence of it, an elementary violation of the first commandment in the decalogue of the horror film: You should be scared. "
“'Rosemary's Baby' and 'The Omen' for very, very poor people. With this badly staged and played horror flick, debut director Richard Caesar is too obviously orienting himself to the classics without even coming close to them for a second. The mother is so naive that the viewer is soon bored in the cinema seat, because everyone already knows what will happen next. Simply poor! "
Web links
- The Calling in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Calling in the online film database
Individual evidence
- ↑ IMDb locations
- ↑ IMDb premiere dates
- ↑ a b The Calling on Prisma.de
- ↑ a b The Calling in the Lexicon of International Films
- ^ The Calling on filmreporter.de
- ^ The Calling in Haiko's Film Lexicon
- ↑ The Calling on schnitt.de