Review | Netflix movie review: The Call – Korean thriller starring Park Shin-hye, Jun Jong-seo bends time and space for a high-concept cat and mouse game
- A remake of The Caller, a British/Puerto Rican thriller from 2011, The Call takes all established rules of time travel movies and turns them on their head
- If you can put logic and realism firmly on hold, the film’s audacious premise proves hugely effective and results in an entertaining experience
3.5/5 stars
If you could contact the past, what would you change? That is the question posed in Korean director Lee Chung-hyun’s deliriously bonkers thriller The Call. Pitching Park Shin-hye (#Alive) against Jun Jong-seo ( Burning ) in an escalating supernatural tête-à-tête, the movie explores the repercussions of a figure from the vengeful past becoming resentful of someone in the present.
Soon after moving back into her abandoned family home, Seo-yeon (Park) receives a mysterious phone call on the old landline from a distraught teenager. Young-sook (Jun) is being held captive by her stepmother (Lee El) and fears for her life.
Seo-yeon discovers a hidden basement in the house, which appears to have been used as a torture chamber, and soon learns that Young-sook died in the same house 20 years earlier.
As though trapped in a demented reimagining of the romantic Korean classic Il Mare , the phone calls continue and the two young women form a strange codependent kinship. Seo-yeon realises that Young-sook’s present is just days before her father died in a house fire, and persuades her new friend to intervene.