Another Hole in the Head Film Festival Coverage
Telephone review.
A game of telephone goes all the way around the world. Why it does that…I’m still not completely sure.
Festival movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Telephone
Directed by Jerzain Ortega
Written by Jerzain Ortega
Starring Santiago Águila, Alexander Marcel Nadler, Rodrigo Murray, Brianne Beets, Erika Magaña and Erick Blackmer
Telephone Review
No idea is too small. I think Richard Branson said that. At least…that’s what Bing AI says when you type in the quote. Telephone tests that theory…but let’s be honest…ideas can be too small. Especially when it comes to movies. The Exorcist: Believer had too small of an idea. Two girls get possessed instead of one is not a worthy successor to William Friedkin’s masterpiece. I don’t know when David Gordon Green’s legacy sequel will stop being my go-to punching bag. I just know that it won’t be today. Telephone’s idea isn’t any bigger than Believer’s. But it still makes for a better movie.
Essentially, Telephone is an hour and a half of watching someone talk on the phone. The locations change, the people change, the conversations change…but it’s pretty much always just watching someone talk on the phone. Writer/director Jerzain Ortega appears to be experimenting with how long that setup can remain interesting. The result is a bit of a mixed bag. It works for longer than you’d expect…but it doesn’t work for long enough.
At this point you are undoubtedly asking yourself what the second idea is. That’s a complicated question. On a macro level I don’t think there is one. On a micro level…each call does serve its own purpose. We see snippets of people’s lives. Fleeting moments with countless characters that each have something to say to someone…and that’s all we’re going to see of them. The cast of characters spans the globe. There’s no way to recap the dozens of calls made in this review.
The call chain begins in the strangest way possible…on a child’s toy telephone. Think of that darn Skinamarink phone. The kid (Junior) is being beckoned to a place he can’t return from. His story ends when his mother’s car is stolen with him inside of it…having apparently slipped into a coma. It’s a surprisingly effective horror movie opening. Of course, Telephone isn’t a horror movie. And it is. It’s all kinds of movies. It’s whatever it needs to be for the moment it needs to be it.
That’s the last we ever see of Junior’s story. The line has moved onto the car thief and his next call is where our journey continues. That man calls a doctor. The doctor calls someone else. And so on. That’s the way Telephone moves forward. Over and over. Again, and again. It’s a fascinatingly simple concept.
Ortega knows that Telephone needs to do more with the concept than follow a chain of people talking about their mundane day to day lives. Along the way we are introduced to several odd characters…briefly pulled into their unique worlds. There are a lot of purposely underdeveloped ideas here. We don’t see backstories or payoffs. We see phone calls.
A young girl named Christie finds herself caught in a murder investigation. We hear a conversation between a porn producer and a prospective answer. Some characters appear to know they’re being watched. A caller claims to be from 1999 with an extremely important message to deliver. Sometimes our caller does so while sitting in a wild and completely unexplained situation…sometimes they call from the bathroom. There is even a clever in-screen intermission break. Some calls are important. Some calls are meaningless. Such is life.
The main problem that Telephone has is the obvious one. It’s an hour and a half of watching someone talk on the phone. Even with fun concepts and eccentric characters strewn throughout the story…there is only so much you can do. It does manage to evoke feelings of weirdness when it wants to….and it ends with a surprising bang. Once the initial intrigue begins to wane, however, you never really get it back.
Ideas can be too small. At least they can when trying to fill out a narrative feature. As an experiment, Telephone is an interesting one. As a movie…it eventually becomes as monotonous as a dial tone.
Scare Value
An experimental film that remains interesting longer than it probably should. Despite its attempts to work around the formula with intriguing concepts…at the end of the day you’re just watching a person talk on the phone. Maybe the purest case of “thinking inside the box” as you’ll ever find. It asks…how many ways can we make talking on a phone interesting. The answer is not enough times.
