There’s nothing worse than being stuck on the phone with customer service. Well, being stuck on the phone with a homicidal maniac would be worse. Unfortunately for banking customer service representative, Izzy Roberston (Sarah Alexandra Marks), this customer wants more than to check his balance, he wants her dead.
In writer/director Richard Anthony Dunford’s horror film, The Caller, a killer is terrorizing the customer service representatives at Regal Union Bank. Izzy Roberston is unknowingly his next victim. House-sitting for her uncle, Izzy drives out to the isolated bungalow, begins working remotely, and spends her days soaking in the jacuzzi with piña coladas and her nights working as a service rep.
During her first night on call, she encounters a disgruntled customer, Caleb Baxter (Eric Roberts), who takes his frustration out on her and threatens her life. Frightened, Izzy tries to shake off the chilling encounter but is contacted again by Caleb, who continues to terrorize her and even reveals he knows the address of the house she’s in. Is the caller all talk? Or is this the night the line goes dead for Izzy permanently?
With a strong opening scene, I had high hopes for this single-location horror film. The initial kill is moody, well-structured, and creepy. After that, the film’s tone, the way it’s shot, and the quality of the story dip considerably.
“…a killer is terrorizing the customer service representatives at Regal Union Bank…”
The Caller could have been more effective as a short film because, for 90 minutes, we are just watching Izzy answer customer service calls. There isn’t much for her to do in this film. Ti West’s boring The House Of The Devil comes to mind, where the protagonist is just sitting in a house “babysitting” with no baby for the entire film. That film, however, had an attractive aesthetic and a worthwhile payoff at the end.
We don’t learn much about Izzy other than that she is on thin ice at work for low call performance. There’s also no connection made between the opening murder and Izzy. Not that Izzy needs to be the killer’s sister or some silly Halloween 2 twist, but a revelation about the killer would have been welcome.
Izzy is house-sitting for her uncle, who looks the same age as she is, which is odd, and we get the impression that the house is somewhere remote to create suspense. But she does have a car, and at no point does she think just to drive away when it is certain that Caleb Baxter is coming to murder her.
She knows full well that the police are on their way to stop him from killing her, and she decides to stay put and take a peloton-adjacent workout class followed by a shower…two activities that scream, “I’m helpless, please kill me!” Giving Izzy something else to do besides wait around to get killed would’ve helped considerably.
Most of the movie is filled with familiar scares and scenarios we’ve seen before in stalker/slasher films. The ending, however, did put a smile on my face. The Caller makes a clever statement about the Covid “work-from-home” environment that effectively took away any boundaries between personal and office space—highlighting the expectation of always being available no matter what was dead on.
"…The ending…was dead on"
