‘The Call’ is Surprisingly my Favorite Movie of 2020

What a year for cinema. Many movies didn’t come out. Many people turned their backs to the big screen and gave a shot to streaming services.

To be honest, streaming services don’t quite do the thing for me when it comes to movies. The quality feels a little meh. When you take a look at my favorite movies, you won’t see any streaming service-made movie.

Anyway, I only watched 16 movies released in 2020. The others were from the previous year. Yeah. This year feels like a failure to me. So I didn’t watch many of them.

This is where “The Call” comes in.

Why unexpectedly? It’s a thriller. And I am not a huge fan of thrillers. It’s Korean. I have seen 5 Korean films or less (fun fact, most of them came right after “The Call”).

When I put a movie at the top of my list for the year, it is probably a drama that makes me cry like a baby — Demolition(2015) I’m looking at you. Or a sci-fi that moves me vastly, like Interstellar(2014).

But this movie moved me in a different way. It had me squeeze my couch from the thrill. In a spoiler-free manner, let me explain about the movie.

The Story

I have seen movies like this before, It’s not unique.

Mirage and Your Name are the most vivid examples of this genre. Your name is actually one of my favorite movies ever, and it’s an anime — who would guess!

It’s not time travel. It’s more of a time-communication kind of movie. Someone in our time speaks with someone from the past.

Mirage did this through a camera. Your Name and The Call did this through the phone.

So, a girl in our modern world gets a call from another girl, asking for help. She later realizes that their call has a gap of 20 years or something. So, the girl of our era, asks for the other girl to save her dad, who died in a gas leak accident. She does that, and everything changes. And more importantly, the movie changes route.

If only she watched Avengers: Endgame… She would know that this leads to alternate realities…

Anyway, she has her dad back. Everything looks wonderful. The family is happy and back together.

But… The girl of the past gets jealous. And she does things, that you have to watch. Enough with spoiling the movie!

Acting

It’s a 5/5 for me. The evil girl from the past (Jong-Seo Jun) plays her role perfectly. She has that wicked look in her eyes that got me hooked. And the girl from our era (Park Shin-Hye) plays an innocent, sweet girl, and the fear in her eyes is drawn perfectly in the film. The movie features only 7 main actors, and 4 of them are girls. Younger and older.

Cinematography

Great atmosphere. Perfectly captures the happy moments of the movie and dark ones too. I don’t have much to say here as it looks like a typical thriller.

Final Thoughts

I know, it’s not the type of film that I will watch again, after many years, to understand the meaning of it from a fresh perspective.

I also know that it will only be in a top 10 thrillers list — which is at the bottom of my listicles, to begin with.

But it's 2020. And this year made us lower our expectations. Both for life, and cinema.

This is why The Call comes as my favorite movie. It made me enjoy my time in this never-ending quarantine. It made me forget my problems. It made me watch every single second of it.

A movie in 2020 that makes you forget of 2020.

Originally published on Medium.