Disturbing, R-Rated 80s Thriller Is An Unwanted Guest That Will Drive You Insane

By Robert Scucci
| Published 16 seconds ago

You know what I like about older psychological thrillers? They don’t rely on an excessive amount of camera tricks to make you question the validity of a character’s reality. In films like 1987’s The Caller, there are no vivid hallucinations, and you’re seeing everything as clear as day. You’re left in the dark about a character’s origins and motives, but that’s exactly what makes it such a fun film.

A woman, simply known as The Girl (Madolyn Smith Osborne), lives alone in a remote cabin. A man, simply known as The Caller (Malcolm McDowell), shows up unannounced, asking to use her phone. The Girl is suspicious of The Caller, but The Caller’s presence and countenance suggest that he has every right to be suspicious of her. It’s such a painfully simple premise, but by the time you get to the third act, you’ll have no idea what’s going on, and in the best kind of way.

A Psychological Thriller That Truly Thrives On Mind Games

When The Caller introduces its only two characters, it lets the viewer know, in no uncertain terms, that they’re about to get epically screwed with. The Girl arrives home after running errands in town and has set the table for two. As far as you can tell, she lives alone. The Caller shows up, explains that his car has a flat tire, and asks if he can use her phone.

Immediately, she’s suspicious. She starts picking apart his story about his car’s make and model. He always has a quick answer, but sometimes those answers contradict what The Girl has actually seen and knows to be true. Other times, she starts talking about her own living situation in ways that make The Caller suspicious that she’s up to no good.

Their stories constantly change. The Girl suggests that she caused The Caller’s car trouble so he’d have no choice but to knock on her door, where she’d invite him in and kill him. The Caller suggests that he’s a police officer who was summoned to her place under the assumption that she murdered her entire family. Both characters start clocking each other for plot holes in their stories. They keep score, and make a game of it.

Each encounter that The Girl has with The Caller gets increasingly unhinged, suggesting they’ve been playing this game of cat and mouse for quite some time, and could quite possibly be trapped in a “choose-your-own-ending” kind of time loop. The evening continues to escalate, and you don’t know who you should be rooting for. The woman being relentlessly stalked by her unwanted guest? Or the hard-working police officer being manipulated by a family-annihilating woman in the middle of a psychotic episode?

More Twists Than Auntie Anne’s!

The mind games played in The Caller are brilliant in their simplicity. It’s a simple premise that slowly heats up until it reaches its boiling point. Both characters are clearly up to something. Their interactions are mostly adversarial, but sometimes surprisingly disarming. One second they’re trying to help each other along in good faith, and the very next moment they’re at each other’s throats, absolutely sure they’re going to get killed the second they let their guard down.

The grounded production makes the mystery all the more enthralling because the only mind games happening are between the characters, not tricks being forced onto the viewer to influence their interpretation either way. They’re saving the real bomb drop for the third-act reveal, which I never would have anticipated in my wildest dreams. I live for these kinds of movies, and what plays out on screen is nowhere near what I was expecting.

I normally pride myself on being able to sniff twist endings out from a mile away, but everything happens so suddenly in The Caller that I never saw it coming. It’s the kind of film you immediately want to watch a second time because you just know they were dropping clues left and right. But since you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t think to clock them until it’s already too late.

The Caller is simple, brooding, and beyond fun if you’re tired of the same old thriller slop Netflix has been putting out lately. Tropes are subverted, motives are always floating around in muddy waters, and you truly don’t know who you’re rooting for because both characters are so manipulative. To solve the mystery that The Caller offers, you can stream it free on Tubi as of this writing.