Spooptober Day 23: The Call

Starring: Park Shin-Hye, Jeon Jong-seo, and Kim Sung-ryung
Written and Directed by: Chung-Hyun Lee

"What? A movie made recently that RJ doesn't fucking hate? Am I really on demiseoffilm.com?" Yes, you are, and there's a catch. Turn this off after the credits begin rolling.

Have you guys ever seen a movie called Frequency? It's got Jim Caviezel and the Quaid brother that isn't crazy in it. It's okay if you haven't. It's pretty good and The Call reminded me a lot of Frequency.

The Call is a movie about a girl who loses her cell phone on the subway. She hooks up the old cordless phone in the house and immediately starts getting calls from a hysterical woman who is screaming about how her mother is torturing her. She asks for help and gives her address.

The calls are coming from inside the house! The calls are being made from a girl in the same house but she lives in 1999. Okay, so while looking up the writer and director for this film, I discovered it was a Korean remake of a British film. Yes, I plan to see the British version, but I still want to gush about this movie a bit.

Since the majority of my readers are English speaking, I'll refer to the women from hereon as their British movie counterparts: Mary will be the woman in present day (or as Mr. Dinosaur says, President Day) and Rose will be the woman in 1999.

The movie starts off feeling very much like Frequency, with Rose saving Mary's dad from a house fire and Mary proving she's in the future by telling catastrophic events that will unfold. However, like in Frequency, there's a killer on the loose. Unlike Frequency, the killer is actually Rose.

The tension in this film was great and both Park Shin-Hye and Jun Jong-Seo are phenomenal in their parts. Look, if you're a longtime reader of Demise of Film, you know that I love South Korean movies, so if you're one of those people who was introduced to SK films through the milquetoast Train to Busan, I highly recommend checking out The Call. That's all there is to it.