Satan has a budget
The Calling (2000): 4 out of 10: An American woman (Laura Harris) marries a handsome British television personality and settles into life on the Isle of Man. Following a wedding night with considerably more mystery than one would generally want from that particular occasion, the couple welcomes a son.
As the boy grows, disturbing incidents and increasingly peculiar behavior from the local villagers suggest that motherhood may involve responsibilities nobody mentioned at the baby shower. Though the pentagram cake should have been a clue.
The Good
The Good: Let us start with Laura Harris. She is a cutie, and she has enough charisma to keep us reasonably invested in a woman whose principal occupation is gradually realizing what everyone watching figured out when they selected the movie. This matters because Harris is on screen for practically the entire picture. If you are going to spend this much time following someone around an increasingly suspicious household, it helps to enjoy her company.
I remembered Harris from The Faculty, where she made quite an impression. (She was buck naked) She remains appealing here, albeit clothed. She can hold one’s attention in a scene. Can she carry an entire movie as a one-woman show? Well…
I also genuinely like the ending. Without spoiling it, the film delivers a variation on the familiar Omen scenario (Well Damien: Omen II if we are going to be accurate) that I have independently thought would make a good twist. Discovering that a movie from twenty-six years ago actually used it was a pleasant surprise. It is not an impossibly complicated idea. In retrospect, it is rather obvious. But obvious ideas can work beautifully when somebody finally bothers to use them.
The last stretch also contains a welcome increase in activity. People stop merely suggesting that something sinister might happen and begin participating in the sinister business. There is a masked orgy. There are developments. The movie briefly (very briefly) remembers that we rented a horror film.
Getting there, unfortunately, requires considerably more patience than the payoff justifies.
The Bad
The Bad: The Calling borrows heavily from Rosemary’s Baby and various Omens. An unsuspecting woman, a suspicious husband, a troubling child, and a community whose extracurricular activities involve more than sheep herding and motorcycle racing. Familiar ingredients, but there is nothing inherently wrong with making another cake.
The problem, however, is that The Calling spends most of the running time describing the ingredients.
Much of the film unfolds as an extended flashback, with Harris recounting events to a priest. And she recounts them. Good Lord, does she recount them. We watch something happen while she explains what happened, presumably for viewers who have wandered into the kitchen and are trying to follow the film over the microwave.
The Calling even has the audacity to have flashbacks of scenes we saw twenty minutes ago while still in the original flashback. Somebody call the Inception police.
Now, narration is not automatically a crime. Goodfellas has extensive narration. Casino has extensive narration. Both get away with it because the voices contribute personality, perspective, rhythm, and information beyond a verbal inventory of the images. They also mix up who gets to tell the story.
Poor Harris is largely left doing the audio description for her own movie. And she is no Robert De Niro… Hell, she is no Lorraine Bracco.
The flashback structure compounds the problem. A thriller needs some sense of immediacy, some feeling that events are escaping the character’s control right now. Here, we keep returning to the reassuring knowledge that our heroine has found time to sit down and provide a detailed account. This can work if the telling itself creates tension. In The Calling, it mostly creates the sensation of listening to somebody explain a much longer film than the one you intended to watch.
And the direction is pedestrian. Point the camera at something. Have Harris explain what the camera is pointed at. Show the next something. Repeat until Satan’s shift begins.
I am inclined to give the screenplay a little more credit than the finished film might initially suggest. There are ideas here, and the ending indicates that somebody had a worthwhile destination in mind. But the journey has all the urgency of a guided tour where the guide refuses to let you look at the next exhibit until she has finished reading the plaque.
Plus, sometimes she describes scenes she could not have been privy to. In the flashback. It was as if the film forgot it was still being narrated from a hospital bed.
The child is another problem, though I would not blame the young actor. He is perfectly serviceable. He simply lacks that quality Damien possessed: the ability to stand quietly in a scene and make you consider whether the family should consult an exorcist before hiring another nanny. (In fairness, he is also not a disaster like the kids in that 2009 Children of the Corn remake)
The surrounding devil worshipers are similarly short on menace. There is a little Father Ted in this community, along with some of the village conspiracy atmosphere from Hot Fuzz. Alas, Hot Fuzz had Timothy Dalton giving everyone a charismatic figure to gather around. Here, the forces of darkness lack a charismatic center.
The Ugly
The Ugly: There are a couple of dreadful musical choices, including a soft, incongruous song that sounds as though it wandered in from a seventies film like The Touch of Satan and cannot find its way out. You are waiting for supernatural dread, and the soundtrack suddenly appears interested in whether raindrops keep falling on somebody’s head.
Then there is the dog business. I have never particularly enjoyed animal suffering as a shortcut to establishing evil. Yes, thank you, the child is sinister. Could he demonstrate this by doing something other than bothering the most likable member of the household?
The scene involving the dog left me uncomfortable, including wondering how it had been filmed. That is not an allegation about what happened during production. It is an observation that I spent the scene worrying about the animal instead of enjoying the horror. This is rarely a useful exchange.
Satan’s powers also seem curiously specialized. His principal area of expertise appears to be manipulating small pieces of metal. If you are on a swing or sitting in a hot tub beneath an electrical appliance, you are in considerable danger. Otherwise, the Prince of Darkness may need to wait until you have to assemble something from IKEA.
The masked orgy deserves partial credit for effort. Unfortunately, it looks less like an invitation into an unimaginable world of decadent evil than a middle-class Isle of Man party where somebody has suggested putting the car keys in a bowl. Eyes Wide Shut need not worry about the competition.
There is also a moment when the film appears poised to do something considerably more daring with its perspective. We have spent so long hearing this woman’s account that I began wondering what would happen if we stepped outside it. What if her supernatural explanation was a delusion? What if the person convinced she was protecting her child was actually the danger?
There’s a point in the film where she is acting like every single crazy woman who drowns their kids or strangles their kids and then drowns them. You know what I’m talking about: a woman who killed their child because they thought their child was possessed by the devil.
How much more fun would this film have been after three quarters of the movie is through with her narration and all that if we pull back and see it from a different point of view and realize she’s a complete psycho, there is no angel that she’s been talking to this whole time and she just murdered her child because she’s insane.
I’m not saying that would have been an uplifting ending or anything, but that would have been a ballsy move by the movie and I would have at the very least given the thumbs up for that.
That is an alternative direction I imagined, not a revelation about the film’s actual ending. But for a moment, I thought the movie might force us to reconsider everything we had accepted through her narration. It would have given that exhausting framing device a purpose.
In Conclusion
In conclusion: The Calling earns a very generous four out of ten through an appealing leading lady, an ending I genuinely enjoyed, and occasional evidence that somebody was trying.
The frustration is that its influences demonstrate what this material can accomplish. Rosemary’s Baby goes there. The Omen goes there. The Devil’s Advocate goes there with Al Pacino practically conducting the orchestra of damnation himself.
The Calling eventually reaches the dollar-store version, about twenty minutes before the end credits.
I liked Laura Harris. I liked the twist. I would have liked the movie considerably more if it had spent less time telling me what I was watching and more time giving me something worth watching.
