Coincidentally, I am headlong into a couple of literature involving time travel. In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, there is a particular seat in a basement cafe that allows anyone to go back to the past but no matter what happens in the past, the present will not change. In Brian K. Vaughan’s Paper Girls, protagonists can meet themselves from the future, at times up to two future selves, with no repercussions unlike Back to the Future. In the movie Synchronic which I caught recently at the cinema, time travel from one particular spot will take you into a past not of your choosing for seven minutes; another locale will take you to another time in the past. So how does one rescue someone trapped in the past?
I like time travel narratives. It is all about setting up the rules in a believable fashion. As long as the protagonists are functioning within the parameters all would be fine. The world-building and rules establishment are always fun in these time continuum narratives, but the good ones do a whole lot more – they know how to drive up the stakes, creating characters you will care about. Netflix’s The Call is a rip-roaring thriller that borrows from Frequency (2000) liberally, and knowing the Koreans, they always know how to take an idea and make it theirs.
The Call begins with a young woman named Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) at a house in the countryside with gothic vibes. Soon, she hears the incessant ring from a landline telephone. Picking it up, she hears the desperate cries of a young woman named Young-sook (Jun Jong-seo), who asserts vehemently that her shaman mother is trying to kill her. The two women soon realise that both of them live in the same house separated by a time of two decades and the landline somehow allows them to connect across time.
Then it gets messed up, albeit in a nice way. Young-sook learns that she can prevent the death of Seo-yeon’s father in her present and he miraculously appears in Seo-yeon’s reality without any prior knowledge of what had happened. That’s a nice moment when they opened the time-traversing Pandora’s Box but things get pretty messed up from that moment onwards.
The Call milks the premise for all it’s worth and then some. It is a frantic mystery thriller that moves at a frenetic pace. There are twists at every narrative turn and it is satisfyingly unpredictable right up until the end-credits. What happens after that is a shambolic plug for a sequel that should never happen, but this part you are in full control – you can simply choose to ignore the coda.
The Call rises up above the formulaic with its sleek execution and a showcase of two outstanding central performances. Park Shin-hye plays Seo-yeon with the right amount of vulnerability coupled with a resolve to best her best-friend-turned-nemesis, while Jun Jong-seo with only her second major role after Lee Chang-dong’s Burning displays an engaging unhinged performance. It is largely on the strength of her character we are not sure what would happen next. However, like Frequency, it reaches a double showdown that feels a tad trite.
The good time travel narratives know that it is a skill to not give the audience time to question the conceit. Otherwise, plot holes the size of moon craters will open up and we fall in. Like I have to question the scene when Young-sook kidnaps the younger version of Seo-yoon and the older version of Seo-yoon doesn’t possess that piece of crucial knowledge till later. Who or what decides the time frame of information becoming sentient for the older person? Arghh… I am getting a headache. Thankfully, The Call doesn’t give me much time to think about the physics and the logic and by far and large this is a piece of solid entertainment, buoyed by a pair of compelling performances. This is one call you need to pick up.
Written by Daniel Chiam
BookMyShow Singapore 
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