In amongst recent press emails, The Caller (2025) stood out for one key reason: it’s a film made by one person (Andy Blithe). What that means here is: one person acts, and the same person makes up all of the crew, too. An interesting fact and no doubt an important project personally, then, but fortunately this is no gimmick and nor does it overshadow the value of the film itself, being a brief but skilfully-made, surprisingly complex treatment of trauma, isolation and the individual.
It all starts with an injured man, crawling from what we can assume is a road accident (fire and sirens frame and soundtrack the shot). He reaches for a child’s toy, and then – we’re somewhere else, in what looks like humdrum normality. But we know the opening scene will be coming back to haunt us, too.
This currently nameless man lives alone, eats alone, and spends a lot of time mulling over the passing of time in a way which you can only do when often alone. Via a voiceover – the actor himself is nearly mute throughout – we glean that this man ‘fills his days with pain and destruction’, though we don’t currently know how. The situation shifts when he receives a strange call: the man on the phone seems to know him, knows what makes him tick. And he has a strange request: fill a glass of water and place it on the window-sill. Okay. Without questioning it, our man does as asked. So far, so harmless, if odd. However, the man on the phone promises that they’ll speak again soon. Could this have something to do with the ‘pain and destruction’ mentioned?
Yes…no…maybe. The man does call back, and when he does, his requests get increasingly more extreme and invasive, soon involving – or actively harming – other people. Why is this happening? Or, if you can scent an existential crisis waiting in the wings, you may question what, exactly, is happening. What is certain is that the narrative does not unfold in a linear way exactly; it’s more episodic, chunked into events which may be completely banal or may be shocking (even if the film itself treads very lightly with the display of actual violence). The audience is held apart, not permitted to simply pick up a thread and follow it. The film feels like a series of mini-ordeals or fragments of routines, and as such it feels very lonely: it feels like something significant is lurking on the periphery before the film slowly reveals a little more: trauma, loss, even addiction feel like possible overarching themes. All of this hinges on the portrayal of the as-yet nameless man. At times he’s lost and afraid, sometimes assured and cruel, and most often of all, unsure what is happening to him. To add to the distancing effect, the film uses some visual puzzles to which we are not immediately privy: what is written on that note? Why is he re-reading it? Will we get to see it?
The Caller is a very stylish piece of film. It’s crisp, well-lit and framed, well edited and sound tracked with a surprising range of shots woven together. It uses intertitles – not my favourite motif, and although they add another visual layer here, they’re a little platitudinal (‘The longest journey is the one within’, etc). But its chief calling card is its close, sympathetic focus on the protagonist, who achieves so much with this role. If anything works against this film – aside from the difficulties of getting independent films seen and appreciated more generally – then it’s its unconventional runtime (forty minutes) and perhaps its genre-straddling approach, but this is a film which does deserve to break through all of that. It’s a skilled take on the theme of modern alienation, with a solid and significant ending which further elevates it.