The Caller

A seriously oddball piece of work, The Caller details the power struggle that ensues between two nameless characters (Madolyn Smith and Malcolm McDowell) within a remote cabin in the woods. It’s clear immediately that filmmaker Arthur Allan Seidelman, working from a script by Michael Sloane, isn’t looking to deliver a traditional thriller here, as The Caller, for the most part, suffers from a pervasively off-kilter feel that’s reflected in its various attributes – with, especially, the often unreasonably strange behavior of the two less-than-compelling protagonists ranking high on the picture’s list of off-putting elements. (Both characters say and do things that rarely seem human, let alone plausible.) There’s little doubt, then, that the decision to focus entirely on Smith and McDowell’s unconvincing and entirely pointless cat-and-mouse exploits proves fairly disastrous, to put it mildly, and though it does seem like this is all leading towards some kind of big reveal, The Caller so thoroughly and completely alienates the viewer that it’s impossible to care once it becomes clear what’s going on here. The movie’s total failure is especially disappointing given the audaciousness of the climactic twist, which would probably have landed better had it come earlier in the picture and provided some much-needed context for the pervasively head-scratching (and predominantly unwatchable) atmosphere.

* out of ****