The Call—A time-splitting thriller where one phone rings and two lives unravel
Introduction
The first time the phone rang, I felt my own stomach drop—how can a sound feel like a haunted memory? The Call opens like a storm rolling over a quiet village, and before you realize it, the lightning has already struck the roof you believe is safe. Have you ever wondered how far you’d go for the chance to un-say one sentence or un-light one flame? This movie pokes that bruise until your breath shortens, then asks you to answer the call anyway. I watched it at night with the lights low, a decision I regretted and loved at the same time, because nothing heightens a homebound nightmare like hearing a phone ring in your own living room. You can stream it on Netflix in the U.S., which means your next pulse-spiking watch is only a click—and one ring—away.
Overview
Title: The Call(콜)
Year: 2020
Genre: Psychological thriller, mystery, horror
Main Cast: Park Shin-hye, Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Sung-ryung, Lee El, Park Ho-san, Oh Jung-se
Runtime: 112 minutes
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Director: Lee Chung-hyun
Overall Story
The Call takes place across two precise years—1999 and 2019—inside the same rural Korean house, where the past and present share walls but not mercy. Released in 2020 and directed by Lee Chung-hyun, it runs a lean 1 hour and 52 minutes, and every second is used to tighten a string between two women until it sings with dread. Seo-yeon, living in 2019, stumbles into her childhood home carrying old grudges and fresh loneliness; Young-sook, trapped in 1999, calls from the very same address, twenty years earlier. A phone becomes a tunnel; grief and curiosity become the shovels. The story builds its logic carefully—rules are simple, consequences are not—so each answered call feels like opening a door you can’t close. And yes, you can watch the whole thing on Netflix, but don’t be surprised if you pause to breathe between rings.
Seo-yeon’s present is brittle: her father died years ago, her relationship with her mother is cracked by blame, and the family home looks more like a memory someone forgot to dust. She loses her smartphone, plugs in an old cordless phone, and hears a terrified girl begging for help. That girl is Young-sook—same age, another time—who fears the shamanic rituals and punishments of her domineering adoptive mother. The film doesn’t caricature either woman; instead it watches how need recognizes need. Their first long conversation feels like two people finding a mirror they didn’t ask for. Have you ever met someone who seems to know the shape of your pain before you finish describing it?
Then the bargaining begins. Seo-yeon confesses that her father died in a household fire back in 1999; Young-sook promises to stop it. When the past pivots, the present snaps into a new shape: Seo-yeon’s scars are gone, her parents are alive, and the old house smiles with warm light and photos that didn’t exist minutes ago. The movie translates time travel into a domestic before-and-after: a dinner that wasn’t supposed to happen, a voice at the table you were sure you’d never hear again. It’s wish fulfillment with a countdown; the joy is real, and the bill is coming. If you’ve ever tried to “fix” something and watched three other things break, you’ll recognize the tremor running through this chapter.
Young-sook’s home life curdles. Her mother, convinced by fortunes and fear that disaster follows her daughter, plans an exorcism that will end in death. Seo-yeon, grateful and newly bold, warns her friend about what’s coming, believing she’s saving a life. What happens instead is a pivot so sharp you can feel the floor tilt: Young-sook turns the ritual into a murder, tasting empowerment as the room goes quiet. The past stops being a damsel and becomes an author. The Call understands how revenge can masquerade as self-defense, and how a favor can mutate into leverage.
From there, time becomes a weapon. Young-sook starts manipulating 1999 with a serial killer’s curiosity, and 2019 starts bleeding out of Seo-yeon’s photo frames. People vanish, places rewrite themselves, refrigerators multiply like bad dreams, and the house—once a refuge—is now an inventory of crimes. A strawberry farmer who once waved hello no longer exists; a memory turns into a rumor. The film shows how the smallest edit in 1999 can delete entire relationships in 2019, a nightmare version of identity theft where your history is the account being drained. Watching it, I kept thinking about identity theft protection in real life—we buy it for our data, but what protects the softer assets like memory and grief when a stranger rewrites your past?
The tug-of-war hardens into blackmail. Young-sook wants to know exactly how she’ll be caught; Seo-yeon refuses, so the past takes a hostage: a much younger Seo-yeon, wide-eyed and defenseless. Present-day Seo-yeon breaks into a police station to raid an old case notebook, trying to stay one move ahead of a predator with a 20-year head start. She even attempts a desperate gambit, steering Young-sook toward a gas explosion to end the threat with physics instead of ethics. It fails, and the punishment lands across time: boiling water poured in 1999 blooms into fresh scars on Seo-yeon in 2019. Have you ever made a split-second decision that branded you longer than any scar could?
With each “correction,” Seo-yeon’s home becomes more dangerous. The film stages a chilling duet: older Young-sook prowls the 2019 house while younger Young-sook hunts Seo-yeon’s mom in 1999. Parallel chases, parallel breaths, parallel creaks on the same staircase—it’s the cinematic version of watching two browser tabs load the same nightmare in different years. You start counting locks, tracing escape routes, thinking about the limits of even the best home security systems when the threat already lives in your timeline. The house itself becomes a character—a witness that can’t testify and a body that won’t stop bleeding.
At the center of it all is a mother-daughter fault line. Seo-yeon has blamed her mother for years, only to learn a truth that slices in the other direction. The movie doesn’t sermonize; it lets the revelation hang between them like a second, heavier phone. As Young-sook closes in, the mother who once seemed diminished reveals a courage that glows through the film’s darkest corridor. Every choice she makes carries the weight of two decades and one imperfect child. When she fights back, it’s not flashy—it’s ferocious.
For a moment, the story offers daylight. The predator falls, the timeline resets, and Seo-yeon steps into a 2019 where her mother is alive—scarred, yes, but walking, laughing, hugging. The relief hits like oxygen after a locked trunk. You want the credits to roll right there, to freeze this earned happiness in amber. The film even lets you breathe for a beat, a kind of grace.
And then it reaches through the screen and pulls that breath away. A mid-credits twist reveals that older Young-sook made one more call—one final warning to her younger self—which rewrites the victory we just held in our hands. The last images aren’t closure but captivity, a reminder that time is merciless when wielded by someone who refuses to let go. It’s a gut-punch that re-colors everything you saw, like realizing the door you locked is a decoy and the real one is still ajar. That’s The Call’s special cruelty: it proves that some threats don’t need monsters or ghosts; they only need access. In a world where we harden our phones with cybersecurity and VPNs, this film whispers the most vulnerable backdoor is still the human heart.
Highlight Scenes / Unforgettable Moments
The first ring in the empty house: Seo-yeon plugs in a battered cordless phone and hears a stranger pleading for help. The camera lingers on damp walls and half-unpacked boxes, a visual rhyme with her half-healed grief. When the caller mentions the same house, you feel the floorboards of time bend. That uncanny little detail—same address, different year—lands softer than a jump scare and scarier than any scream. It’s the moment The Call promises you a fair trade: realism in exchange for terror. And it keeps that promise.
Birthday dinner that shouldn’t exist: After Young-sook prevents the 1999 fire, Seo-yeon sits down to a dinner with both parents in 2019—candles, smiles, inside jokes that weren’t there an hour ago. The sequence is shot with warm, almost nostalgic lighting, and it’s devastatingly tender. You feel the magic and the wrongness at once, like holding a counterfeit bill that still buys you bread. The film wants you to taste the sweetness before it snatches the plate away. This is the dream that will cost everyone more than they can afford.
The exorcism becomes a murder: Young-sook’s adoptive mother binds her for a ritual she believes will avert catastrophe. But fear weaponizes faith, and the ritual curdles into brutality long before the killing blow. When Young-sook reverses the power dynamic, it’s both catharsis and omen. The room goes quiet, and you realize the movie has just changed genres—from rescue story to survival horror. Sometimes the scariest villains are born in acts that look like self-defense.
The strawberry delivery and the fridges: A friendly kid drops off strawberries in 1999; a kind man tends a strawberry farm in 2019. Then a refrigerator door opens on the past, and the present loses someone without a goodbye. The Call uses mundane objects—produce crates, fridge doors, grocery bags—as portals of dread. It’s brilliant because it’s ordinary, the way a hallway becomes terrifying after a break-in. You don’t trust kitchens for a while after this.
“Pick up the phone!” on the floor: When Seo-yeon returns to a further-decayed 2019, the chalked command scrawled across wood planks feels like a curse. It’s not just a message; it’s proof the past is staging the present like a set. The phrase is a threat disguised as an invitation—answer me, or I’ll write a worse sentence next. It perfectly distills the movie’s thesis that communication can be coercion. Seeing words where memories should be is a specific kind of terror.
Two chases, one staircase: In the climax, older Young-sook stalks 2019 Seo-yeon while 1999 Young-sook hunts Seo-yeon’s mother through the same architecture. The cross-cutting doesn’t just build suspense—it proves cause-and-effect across decades. Every slammed door has an echo; every fall has a future. When the mother makes her stand, it’s the purest expression of love the movie offers. I found myself whispering “run” at my screen like it could travel backward in time.
Memorable Lines
"I had a really fun thought." – Young-sook, savoring the shift from prey to predator A deceptively innocent line that signals the exact moment kindness curdles into cruelty. It’s chilling because it sounds like a child picking a game, but the game is murder. The delivery, almost playful, teaches you not to trust the smile on the other end of a phone. From here on, every “idea” she has is a bruise waiting to bloom.
"I'm going to kill you!" – Seo-yeon, not bluffing anymore Rage is an oxygen mask after too many gasps of fear, and this line is her first full breath. It’s not about vengeance so much as a refusal to be hunted. You can feel the years of blame toward her mother funnel into something sharper: resolve. It marks the moment she stops negotiating with the past and starts fighting it.
"Pick up the phone!" – A message scrawled like a threat across the floor The words aren’t spoken, but they ring louder than any scream because they were written to be obeyed. It’s the past asserting control over the present with the simplest imperative. Seeing that command reframes the house from setting to snare. You realize nothing in this home belongs to Seo-yeon anymore—not even her choices.
"You and I are alike." – Young-sook, twisting kinship into leverage The sentence pretends to be empathy while scouting for a weak spot. It matters because the film keeps asking whether similarity is a bridge or a trap. Seo-yeon wants the bridge; Young-sook wants the trapdoor. By the time you hear this, it’s already closing.
"Your fortune says there are several deaths in your future." – Young-sook’s mother, a prophecy weaponized by fear It’s the line that cages a life—first as superstition, then as self-fulfilling excuse. In a story about altering outcomes, this fatalism becomes gasoline. The more she believes it, the more she behaves like the world is a hallway with one door. And someone always gets pushed through.
Why It's Special
The Call takes a simple idea—a phone linking two women across time—and spins it into an unnervingly intimate duel about fate, regret, and the terrifying ripple effects of every choice. The premise is elegant: one woman in 2019 picks up a landline and hears another woman living in the same house, but in 1999. From that first ring, the story tightens like a coiled spring. If you’re looking for a gripping night in, it’s available to stream on Netflix in the United States and many other regions, which makes pressing play delightfully easy. The film originally launched on Netflix worldwide on November 27, 2020, after its theatrical plans were derailed, a pivot that put this Korean thriller directly into living rooms around the globe.
What makes it stick with you isn’t just the twisty plot but the way it humanizes terror. Have you ever felt this way—wanting just one moment back to make a different decision? The Call pushes that yearning to the extreme and asks what any of us might risk to rewrite a painful past. It’s time travel as an emotional reckoning, less about paradoxes and more about how grief, guilt, and longing can turn into something monstrous. The result is a thriller that feels both mythic and eerily personal.
The film’s direction keeps you leaning forward. Director Lee Chung-hyun stages the house like a living organism—walls remember, floors bruise, and the cordless phone becomes a loaded weapon. The camera prowls and pauses at just the right moments, giving you space to dread the next ring. There’s a clinical clarity to the visuals that lets the violence land without spectacle, sharpening the moral stakes every time the timeline shudders.
Writing-wise, The Call is clever without feeling mechanical. It plays fair with cause-and-effect yet leaves you guessing how a tiny nudge in 1999 will snowball into catastrophe two decades later. The screenplay’s best trick is how it weaponizes friendship; the women’s bond begins with empathy and curdles into manipulation, a transformation that feels tragically human even as it becomes horrifying.
Tonally, the movie glides between psychological dread and full-throttle suspense. One minute you’re savoring the intimacy of a whispered confession; the next, you’re jolted by a cut that reveals how the present has mutated while a character was still catching her breath. It’s a rare thriller that earns both goosebumps and gut punches, refusing to soothe you with easy answers.
Genre fans will love the blend: a science-fiction hook, a serial-killer thriller’s pulse, and a character drama’s bruised heart. The time-link conceit is never just a gimmick; it’s the hinge that lets guilt swing open into obsession. Even the score, all eerie hums and metallic shivers, feels like it’s vibrating through the copper wires of that haunted phone.
Finally, the craft is immaculate. The editing by Yang Jin-mo (whose precision has been widely acclaimed) slices through timelines with surgical confidence, while Dalpalan’s music thrums like an approaching storm. The film is officially based on the 2011 feature The Caller, but Lee Chung-hyun’s version stands firmly on its own—more psychologically jagged, more emotionally raw, and far more memorable.
Popularity & Reception
When The Call arrived on Netflix, it tapped into a fast-growing global appetite for Korean thrillers. Word-of-mouth spread quickly; the hook was easy to explain, but the experience was hard to shake. Many viewers discovered it during late-night browsing and found themselves wide awake, replaying choices alongside the characters while the credits rolled. That streaming-first release amplified the film’s aftershocks, letting viewers across continents share theories about the ending.
Critics responded with admiration for its nerve and its performances. On Rotten Tomatoes’ dedicated page for the Korean film, it holds a rare perfect score from a dozen published reviews, with outlets praising its craft and its emotional voltage. Reviews from places like Dread Central, Decider, and Thrillist singled out its unpredictability and the way it juggles tones without losing control, pointing especially to the two lead performances as the film’s beating heart.
Family-oriented guides even weighed in, noting its intensity and advising discretion for younger viewers—evidence that the movie crossed from niche thriller circles into broader household conversation. When a film’s content advisories become a talking point, you know it has seeped into mainstream attention.
Awards season confirmed what fans already felt: this was a breakthrough. Jeon Jong-seo won Best Actress at the prestigious Baeksang Arts Awards for her ferocious turn, a career-sealing recognition that put her squarely on the global radar. She also took home Best Actress at the Buil Film Awards and at the Director’s Cut Awards, sealing The Call’s reputation as a performance-driven phenomenon.
Years later, the film’s staying power shows up in roundups that spotlight must-watch Korean movies available right now. Entertainment Weekly’s curated list of standouts on Netflix places The Call alongside modern genre touchstones, a testament to its enduring “you-have-to-see-this” factor for new fans of Korean cinema and seasoned devotees alike.
Cast & Fun Facts
The soul of The Call is the collision between Park Shin-hye and Jeon Jong-seo. Park plays Seo-yeon, a woman in 2019 who is aching for a do-over. Her performance is marked by restraint that cracks at precise moments—one tremble of the lip, one clipped breath—and she makes the thriller’s sci‑fi logic feel rooted in recognizable grief. Watching her react as the room around her subtly “updates” after a call is like watching someone feel the ground move under their feet for the first time; the terror is interior, and Park lets us live inside it.
In Park’s hands, Seo-yeon is not a saint but a daughter wrestling with guilt and the wish to fix the unfixable. Her choices give the movie its moral ache: every plea she makes over the phone is also a plea to herself. The more the past improves, the more the present curdles—Park charts that whiplash beautifully, shaping a heroine whose desperation is as relatable as it is dangerous.
If Park is the film’s conscience, Jeon Jong-seo is its knife-edge. As Young-sook, the woman on the other end of the line in 1999, Jeon starts as brittle and wounded, then blooms into something mesmerizingly terrifying. She doesn’t play a “villain” so much as a void that keeps learning—curiosity twisting into cruelty, gratitude souring into entitlement. Her physicality—the tilt of the head, the sudden stillness—turns every phone ring into a threat.
Jeon’s performance didn’t just earn gasps; it earned hardware. She won Best Actress at the 57th Baeksang Arts Awards, and followed with Best Actress wins at the Buil Film Awards and the Director’s Cut Awards, cementing her status as one of the most electrifying screen presences of her generation. It’s the kind of role that can define a decade for a performer, and Jeon meets it with fearless precision.
As for the mothers who shape these women’s fates, Kim Sung-ryung brings a delicate mixture of warmth and weariness to Eun-ae, Seo-yeon’s mother. Even when she’s on the periphery, her presence anchors the story in a parent’s imperfect love, making the film’s time-shocks cut deeper. In a movie saturated with dread, her scenes remind you what all the terror is for: the stubborn, tender wish to protect family, even when time itself won’t cooperate.
Kim Sung-ryung also provides the narrative with a crucial moral counterweight. When the timeline shifts, she becomes a living measure of what was gained and what was lost—her scars, her smile, the lingering pain in her eyes. That gentle recalibration of a mother-daughter bond is the film’s most human reward and its cruelest tease, and her portrayal makes each altered moment resonate.
Across the time divide stands Lee El as Ja-ok, the domineering guardian steeped in shamanic ritual, whose iron grip becomes the crucible that forged Young-sook’s fury. Lee El doesn’t overplay; she lets authority harden in her voice and ritual gestures, creating a maternal presence that is both mystical and suffocating. The house feels colder when she enters, and the story darker for it.
In her second arc, Lee El shades Ja-ok with flashes of fear and superstition, hinting at how control can be its own form of terror. That textured portrayal helps the film avoid caricature—she’s not merely cruel, she’s convinced, and that conviction breeds catastrophe. The push-pull between her and Young-sook becomes a haunting study of inheritance: what we absorb, what we resist, and what we become despite ourselves.
A final nod belongs to writer-director Lee Chung-hyun, whose debut feature here displays remarkable command. He reshapes the 2011 story template into a lean, mean thriller that is more intimate than grand, more character-driven than plot-drunk. With Jo Young-jik’s sleek cinematography and Yang Jin-mo’s razor edits, he orchestrates a symphony of dread where every cut could change a life. If you love the sensation of a film tightening its grip with each scene, his direction is why.
Conclusion / Warm Reminders
If you’ve ever wanted a thriller that leaves you breathless but also strangely moved, The Call is the one to answer. Because it’s on Netflix, it’s easy to cue up on the best streaming service you already use for your movie nights, and it plays beautifully whether you’re on a 4K setup or watching on the go. If you’re traveling, many viewers rely on the best VPN for streaming to keep access consistent abroad, and a solid home internet plan ensures those timeline flips arrive without a stutter. Most of all, invite a friend to watch—half the fun is asking each other, “What would you change?” after the final sting.
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