The Call

Halle Berry is a 911 Emergency operator who feels responsible for the death of a girl, having redialled when the hiding victim was disconnected and the prowler was alerted to her presence by the ring tone. Shaken, Berry has retreated from the front line to train in future operators, but during a tour of the facilities, 911 receive an emergency call from a frantic Abigail Breslin who has been kidnapped and forced into the boot of a car by Michael Eklund. Berry once more steps into the hot seat and attempts to detect Breslin's location...

For a decent hour, The Call was working. It might set up the characters rather crudely - Romance angle? Check. Dark past that must be confronted? Check. Get a spare phone into Breslin's possession? Check. - but it gets the job done. Berry pulls off a difficult role because she, like Ryan Reynolds in Buried, has really nothing to bounce off, forced to stare intently into the middle distance and occasionally wipe away an errant tear. Breslin meanwhile does all she can do cooped up in the dark boot of a car. The dialogue between the two has the right amount of rising panic. Eklund's pointing cheeks and slack jaw had the right amount of menace and director Brad Anderson (his first movie since 2004's The Machinist) drops the audience right in the mix as he moves things along at a nice clip. Not easily done when your movie is basically two people – one prone, the other sitting down – talking on the phone.

But during the good stuff dark clouds loom that foreshadow where it might all go wrong. And, boy, does it go wrong. One operator's offhand remark that the hard thing about the job is how the operator never knows how the emergency turns out: did the police get there in time? Was the victim saved? It doesn't take a genius to know that that's going to happen, which would be forgivable if The Call didn't get any worse. But it does. Much worse. All kinds of worse.

It's a shame that after sustaining tension for so long The Call becomes a laughing stock.