My Dinner With Skynet

  Two actors, one location, 90 minutes of yapping - a new all-time favorite.

  Both actors work in tandem to carry this but they're flexing different muscles. Madolyn Smith-Osborne is a rumbling volcano who threatens to explode in every scene. Even when she seems fine, there's always some seismic shift in her expression or rumbling in her throat. She goes big because she has to but these aren't feeble attempts to out-act her co-star, especially since he's holding back. Malcolm McDowell isn't doing his typical scenery-chewing but, instead, nibbling and nipping with smarmy cuntiness; he's going to finish his meal on his terms. What they have in common is how they each bring history to these characters while every exchange is another spadeful layer on the lede.

 

  You see, so much of this story is deliberately withheld from us, which made my first watch alienating. Every time I thought I had a read on it, it'd switch things up in ways that left me more annoyed than intrigued. There were editing choices that felt nonsensical and character choices that felt absurd. Because of its initial set-up I thought this was going to be a slasher genre take on War Of The Roses; dialog-driven suspense around gender politics. No, it's much...much more than that. Of course I didn't find this out until the very end, so for 90% of the runtime I was perpetually disillusioned with it.

  I honestly thought it was going to end with me feeling like my time had been wasted. It looks good and the blocking is always dynamic but I feared that'd be all I got out of it. The lumber of doubt I had stacked against this thing was blocking my view of the forest.

 

  The ending, an epiphany of riches, sets everything right with 20/20 vision. It's a twist that feels like a kind of narrative mothership unveiling, revealing every other saucer responsible for my dysphoria. Ultimately, not only did I not feel like my time had been wasted but I willfully invested more by watching it a second time. Every choice that I thought was stupid turned out to be deliberate and brilliant. And, again, it doesn't betray its propensity for mystery because, thankfully, the twist isn't some over-written exposition dump but a necessary kind of information leak that tells us just enough to piece it together ourselves. The dialog simultaneously covers its tracks while also leaving secret blacklight clues for those who are gifted with hindsight.

  I love when movies are able to completely recontextualize themselves after a certain point and The Caller is one of the finest examples.