Rating: B
Dir: Mike J. Marin
Star: Mike J. Marin, Lisa McKay, Gia Fisher, isaac David Trimble
According to the director, he “wanted to take a different, kinda risky approach to telling a story through an audio narrative that makes the viewer have to use their imagination to formulate the visuals of the story being told.” What? Use my imagination? Seems like an awful lot of work to me. If I wanted to do that kind of thing, I’d read a book or something. It’s certainly not why I watch movies. Those are me to consume passively the results of other people using their imaginations. Ok, in case you couldn’t tell, there’s a certain amount of sarcasm there – yet also a germ of truth, because cinema is a visual medium, first and foremost: “Show, don’t tell”.
That said, there’s always going to be room for Marin’s approach, simply because it is different. During the great bulk of this, what you are being shown in simply one man, sitting in front of his computer. Put another way: my day job. The difference being that the man in question here is an emergency services dispatcher in Los Angeles, Emmett ‘Bad’ Marcus (Marin). He’s not any normal dispatcher either: a formal paranormal investigator, his particular area of specialty is to handle the weird calls. This begins in the form of an interview over Zoom, with reporter Stephanie Guzman (McKay) quizzing Marcus about his job, how he got the position and what it entails. Then she asks about his strangest experience…
And this is when the film shifts largely to Emmett in front of his computer, remaining there for the next hour (the film only runs seventy minutes, probably wisely). After a few ‘normal’ calls, we get to the meat of the matter: a very panicked call from a house, where a trio of young people attempted to carry out a ritual, only for things to go wrong. Neither the police dispatched to the scene, nor the EMTs, are prepared for what they find, and a citywide comms breakdown means no backup is coming. Emmett, with his knowledge of the paranormal, is the only person who might be able to help, juggling between the first responders and the inhabitants of the house.
The fairly relaxed opening does a good job of luring you in, and setting things up. As a result, when the screaming, banging and sounds I can’t even describe properly kick off, your brain is receptive to them. It is true that the viewer needs to put in the work, assembling the fragmentary audio, along with Emmett’s explanations to the first responders, into a coherent plot. Yet most of this works, although occasionally you can tell the conversations have been edited together, with the rhythm slightly ‘off’. This probably shouldn’t succeed as well as it does. If less polished than The Guilty, it does a similarly good job of taking its limited resources and turning the restrictions into strengths, putting you right in there with Emmett as handles the calls and escalating carnage.