A Girl, (Madolyn Smith Osborne) is living alone in a house in the woods. Returning home from shopping she finds an abandoned car at the edge of the forest. No one is around. She inspects the car and finds a dismembered doll in the glove compartment. She leaves the car and goes on her way.
At home she brings into the house a hatbox with some red liquid dripping from it. She places the hatbox in her daughter’s old room and takes a shower. All the while she is going about her business someone is sneaking around the house and peeking into the windows.
As she is preparing dinner there is a knock at the door. She opens it expecting to see her boyfriend. Instead, there is a man in a trench coat standing on the porch. He tells her that he had car trouble and wants to use her phone to call a tow company. Girl lets him in. During his visit their conversation begins to turn dark. Eventually the Caller leaves.
Girl sees Caller again the next day in town. He gives her a ride in a sports car that he says was a loaner from the garage. Over a period of three- or four-days Caller and Girl have some cryptic conversations as if they were participants in some strange game where each of them earns points for discovering lies in each other’s stories. Caller sees pictures of Girl’s late husband and daughter on the walls. He says he is a cop and accuses her of killing them, but she says her husband died in the war and that her daughter is away. They pick apart each other’s stories.
Their cat and mouse game continues. The question is, who is the mouse and who is the cat?
“The Caller” was released in 1987 and was directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman. It is a psychological thriller with some science fiction aspects.
This was a very strange film, and I still have no clue what it was totally about. Still, somehow it was compelling, and I watched on hoping to get answers at the end. What I got was more confusion. Despite the ambiguity the ending was, in some respects, satisfying and in others wall punching frustrating. I’m still trying to decide if I liked it or not.
Although there is some action in the film, most of it is dialogue. To some that may seem boring, but the dialogue is critical to the plot. There are only two actors in the film, both of them very good, both of them intense. The title of the film is a little misleading. The caller is not someone on the phone, but someone at the door. And he’s creepy as hell, but then so is the homeowner.
I can’t go into a lot of detail about the film since being kept in the dark through most of it is the point. You may have to watch it more than once to get most of the subtleties. Every prop and every lie bring the story forward.