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Call, The (15)

Crime, Thriller

When a veteran 911 operator takes a life-altering call from a teenage girl who has just been abducted, she realizes that she must confront a killer from her past in order to save the girl's life.


The critical consensus

The serious subject of child abduction and murder isn’t well served by the way Anderson’s film veers into a comic book / vigilante drama, ultimately making this a call worth missing.

**(*)(*)(*)Eddie Harrison, The List, 05/09/2013

Berry’s fine performance powers a gutsy, original thriller that keeps you on tenterhooks… until the dumbest finale in years makes you wish you hadn’t bothered.

***(*)(*)Paul Bradshaw, Total Film, 13/09/2013

The kind of clichéd nonsense so common in the mid-'90s, it's a throwback - and not necessarily in a good way.

**(*)(*)(*)Neil Alcock, Empire Online, 16/09/2013

We're suddenly in B-movie horror territory. Still, Berry and Breslin make a good women-in-peril double act.

***(*)(*)Henry Fitzherbert, Daily Express, 19/09/2013

A promising picture turns into gibberish. Shame.

**(*)(*)(*)Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 19/09/2013

Once Berry transforms herself from 911 operator to detective-crime-fighter (a first in the history of call centres, surely?), The Call goes wildly off message and deep into absurdity.

*(*)(*)(*)(*)Anthony Quinn, The Independent, 19/09/2013

It’s only when The Call attempts to progress beyond the parameters it has set itself that things start to fall apart a little – although even then the ludicrous nature of the finale proves entertainingly loopy.

***(*)(*)Alistair Harkness, The Scotsman, 21/09/2013

Although the climax has little credibility (there were a few audible groans in the audience), thematically it's completely on the money, proving that Clover's theories about empowering gender reversals in apparently sleazy movies are much more than phoney-baloney rhetoric.

Mark Kermode, The Observer, 22/09/2013

Where and when?

General release. Check local listings for show times.

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