The Call (2013 film)

The Call
Theatrical Poster
Directed by	Brad Anderson
Screenplay by	Richard D'Ovidio
Story by	Nicole D'Ovidio Jon Bokenkamp Richard D'Ovidio
Produced by	Bradley Gallo Jeffrey Graup Michael A. Helfant Michael Luisi Robert Stein
Starring	Halle Berry Abigail Breslin Morris Chestnut Michael Eklund Michael Imperioli
Cinematography	Tom Yatsko
Edited by	Avi Youabian
Music by	John Debney
Production companies	Troika Pictures WWE Studios
Distributed by	TriStar Pictures (USA theatrical) Stage 6 Films (USA all media)
Release date	March 15, 2013 (2013-03-15)
Running time	96 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$13 million
Box office	$30,100,000

The Call is a 2013 thriller film starring Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin and directed by Brad Anderson. The film, pronounced to be high-concept by many reviewers, was released on March 15, 2013.

Plot

Jordan Turner (Halle Berry) is a 9-1-1 operator who receives a call from Leah Templeton (Evie Thompson), a teenage girl whose house is being attacked by a serial killer (Michael Eklund). Jordan's clever instructions allow Leah to evade the killer, but when the call disconnects, Jordan redials the number, alerting the killer. The mistake results in Leah's capture and she is found dead several days later.

Jordan confides to her boyfriend Officer Paul Phillips (Morris Chestnut) that the event has put her in a mental state where she can no longer field calls. Six months later, she is now a trainer for 911 operators. At this time, the same killer kidnaps another teenager Casey Welson (Abigail Breslin) from a mall parking lot and drives away with her in the trunk of his car. Brooke (Jenna Lamia), a rookie operator, receives the call and clearly cannot handle it; Jordan sees this and takes over. Because Casey is using a disposable phone, they cannot get an exact GPS location of her. Jordan guides Casey into signalling nearby cars who call 911, allowing the police to narrow their search. The killer kills several citizens who intervene, and switches cars with Alan Denado (Michael Imperioli), one of his victims, to elude the police. However, he inadvertently leaves fingerprints at the scene of the car switch, and the police are able to determine his identity, Michael Foster.

Michael arrives at his location and finds Casey on the phone, mid-call with 911. After Jordan tells Michael that they know his identity, he smashes the phone. Paul realizes that Casey looks very similar to Michael's deceased sister. While their childhood home had been burned down (implied to have been arson by Michael), a nearby secondary house still stands. The police raid the house but find no one. Jordan is mentally anguished by a second failure to save a child from Michael, and visits the secondary home for clues. While there, she recognizes the sound of a flagpole from the final moments of the 911 call, and finds a trap door amongst the grass where the primary house used to stand. She goes in without calling the police.

Combining clues from the second half of the film as well as observations of Michael in the cellar, his back story is put together. Michael had romantic feelings towards his sister and wanted to marry her (it is unclear if she reciprocated such advances). However, she contracted a disease as a teenager (most likely leukemia), lost all her hair, and died. Michael has a prop head that he treats like his sister, but he needs a replacement for her hair. He's apparently been killing many women who have hair similar to his sister's without the police realizing. He takes the scalps of his victims, but so far, none of the scalps have been correct, leading to repeated killings.

Jordan finds Casey tied in the cellar. As Michael is about to scalp her, he shows some remorse for his actions but says he can't stop. Jordan attacks him, freeing Casey. Casey and Jordan fight against Michael and manage to knock him out. They tie him up in the cellar and then abandon him to die (without calling the police), using the cover story that Casey escaped and they don't know where Michael went, Foster tells Jordan that she can't leave him like this, Jordan responds by saying its already done and slamming the cellar door, trapping Foster in there.

Cast

• Halle Berry as Jordan Turner
• Abigail Breslin as Casey Welson
• Morris Chestnut as Officer Paul Phillips
• Michael Eklund as Michael Foster
• David Otunga as Officer Jake Devans
• Michael Imperioli as Alan Denado
• Justina Machado as Rachel
• José Zúñiga as Marco
• Roma Maffia as Maddy
• Evie Thompson as Leah Templeton
• Denise Dowse as Flora
• Ella Rae Peck as Autumn
• Jenna Lamia as Brooke
• Ross Gallo as Josh

Production

Pre-production

The film was originally entitled The Hive. It was originally conceptualized as a television series.

Co-screenwriter Richard D'Ovidio told an interviewer how he was inspired to write the story: "My wife was listening to an NPR segment, and she heard a 911 operator talking about her job, and I thought, 'That's a world we've never seen before in a film.' You never get to see the other side of it. [They were playing some actual calls on the news segment, and] listening to the calls, I got a chill up my spine as I envisioned what was going on [on the other end of the phone], and I thought that it would be a great world to play into." D'Ovidio chose two female leads because, he said, "I wanted strong women... I think it was appropriate here, since most 911 call operators are women." Halle Berry told an interviewer, "I love the idea of being a part of a movie that was so empowering for women. We don't often get to play roles like this, where ordinary people become heroic and do something extraordinary."

As well as collaborating on the story with his wife, Nicole D'Ovidio, and with Jon Bokenkamp, Richard D'Ovidio accepted suggestions from Berry, Breslin, and Eklund: "Halle came in with some great notes and Abigail and Michael, too, and it started to flesh things out. I'm not one to say 'no' to a great suggested line of dialogue. It just makes me look better as a writer! I feel it's a very collaborative process, and some of the happiest accidents happen when you just listen to people. When someone comes up to you and says, 'Why don't we do it this way?', I think that it's important to listen."

Berry prepared for the role by visiting a call center and observing the operators at work. She told a Miami Herald interviewer, "You get a different perspective by doing research... You can't know what it's like to be a cop even though you've seen it in the movies. But nobody ever saw a 911 center. I thought they lived in the ground somewhere! It was interesting to see who they were and how they deal and how stressful it can be. I was a wreck [watching them]. They would just be as cool as can be doing their thing. I thought, 'I could never do this job.'"

Chestnut prepared by riding along with Los Angeles police officers to observe what it's like to be an officer in a squad car.

Filming

Berry told interviewer Kimberly Grant, "The hard part for me was to try to stay connected to Morris' and Abigail's characters." This was because, Grant writes, "she had to spend an entire day reading 21 pages of dialogue, rattling off in quick succession 911-operator jargon, that would be cut and edited to fit the film... In film terms, that means Berry performed for 21 minutes straight with no breaks; not an easy feat for any actor." Berry told Grant that it was difficult being unable to see her co-stars for most of the film: "That was my constant challenge; to stay on such an emotional level [as Jordan], so that I would be on the same level as they [i.e., Casey and Officer Phillips] were. I used that feeling of frustration and of being stuck to fuel my character."

In July 2012, Berry was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after falling head-first on concrete while shooting a fight sequence. A spokesperson for Berry confirmed that she suffered a minor head injury and was taken to the hospital as a precaution, but she checked out healthy and was released.

Locations

The production was filmed in Los Angeles, at the Burbank Town Center on Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank, California, and in Santa Clarita, California The Freeway scene was filmed in San Pedro next to the ports of Los Angeles.

Release

Promotion

The Women's International Film Festival hosted a screening of The Call at the Regal South Beach movie theater on February 26, 2013. Chestnut told the audience that he would sign on for a sequel, saying about Berry, "I didn't get to kiss this woman enough!" Berry added, "I'm in the movie and even I was scared."

Berry and Chestnut also promoted the film at the ShowPlace ICON movie theater at the red-carpet premiere in Chicago on February 28.

Reception

Box Office

The Call was expected to earn about $11-12 million on its opening weekend (according to boxoffice.com) in the U.S., but, opening in 2,507 theaters, surpassed this by a significant margin and grossed $17 million in its first three days. This indicated nice profits, as the film cost about $13 million to produce and TriStar Pictures paid much less to acquire U.S. distribution rights.

Critical response

The Call has received mixed reviews from critics, as it currently holds a 40% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 81 reviews with the consensus: "The Call builds plenty of suspense before taking a problematic turn in the third act."

Entertainment Weekly gave the movie a rating of B, saying that the tale "is surprisingly good, and surprisingly gruesome, fun. Michael Eklund makes the most of the maniac role, and Breslin is a sympathetic victim." Reviewer Dwight Brown wrote, "The script gives Berry a blue-collar character she can make accessible, vulnerable and gutsy... Chestnut is suitably gallant and stalwart as her caring lover and a cop on a mission... This film is a whole lot scarier than you think it's going to be."

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote, "An effectively creepy thriller about a 911 operator and a young miss in peril, The Call is a model of low-budget filmmaking." She praised its "clean, clever premise" and said that Berry's Jordan is "an old-fashioned hero in many respects, so it's fitting that Mr. Anderson uses old-fashioned filmmaking techniques, like crosscutting, to build tension, and old-school exploitation tricks, like evil, to justify taking the story dark, and then dark and bonkers."

The reviewer for The Hutchinson News, Jake Coyle, wrote, "Director Brad Anderson... working from the simple, high-concept screenplay by Richard D'Ovidio, ably cuts between Berry's increasingly emotionally-attached Jordan Turner and Breslin's panicking Casey Welson, contrasting the fraught strategizing of Turner with the frantic police pursuit of the kidnapper." Coyle stated that "The Call dials up a shallow thrill ride, but one efficiently peppered with your typical 'don't go in there!' moments," but concluded, "The Call is a rudimentary, almost old-fashioned 90-minute escape that manages to achieve its low ambitions." Rating the film 2 stars out of 4, Coyle writes that once the film "manages to build some suspense from the trunk of the car - the clever attempts to elicit help, the dwindling cell phone battery - its deficiencies become less forgivable once the action turns off the road."

Roger Moore of the The Seattle Times showed mixed feelings in his review: "Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as The Call does at almost precisely the one-hour mark. Which is a crying shame, because for an hour this is a riveting, by-the-book kidnapping." Moore explained what he saw as the highs and lows: "Brad Anderson turns this...serial-killer hunt...into a real edge-of-your-seat thriller. Given...a half-decent tale of horror, guilt, problem-solving and redemption, Anderson couldn't go far wrong," but, Moore states, "It's only when our Oscar-winning heroine puts down the phone and sets out to do some sleuthing of her own that The Call disconnects, turning into something far more generic and far less exciting." The Los Angeles Times turned in a similar review: "The semi-fresh thriller, set mainly in an emergency call center and on the freeways of Los Angeles, puts a tech slant on a damsel-in-distress setup. It buzzes along for a while, the promising plot innovations inviting suspension of disbelief, before by-the-numbers implausibility, over-the-top valor and unsavory contrivances take over and the line goes dead."

External links

• The Call at IMDb
• The Call at Box Office Mojo
• The Call at Rotten Tomatoes