“Treating My younger Self” is an ongoing series where I watch movies from my childhood that I was obsessed with even though I hadn’t seen them. Read my previous installments here and here.
Pre-review
A year ago, I watched the 2006 remake of When a Stranger Calls. I had a complicated relationship with this one, as I was as much obsessed with it as I was terrified of it.
This was around the time I got my first cell phone, and, as it happens, the first time I experienced receiving spam calls from strange area codes. It also just so happens that this was during the time my biggest fear was getting kidnapped.
As the robocalls rolled in, I mentally engineered the possibility that different parts of my house had different area codes, thus, it became entirely probable to me that someone calling from a 541 number was actually some dude crouched behind the couch in my basement in Virginia, and he was trying to contact me to tell me he was going to come upstairs, kidnap me and sell me on the black market at a price well below what I considered fair value.
So, what I knew - or thought I knew - about this movie scared me deeply and I never watched it. At the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Maybe it was my yearning to conquer my fears, or maybe it was because I thought the girl on the movie poster was cute, but for whatever reason, I was drawn to it—tied to it, even—like some sort of invisible string only Taylor Swift could sing about.
So now, years and years later, it feels as appropriate a time as any to watch this and treat my younger self to some much-needed closure. Hopefully, it’ll show that frightened little kid that there was nothing to be afraid of since, all it is, is probably just a really bad movie.
Review
This was so stupid. But I want to be sensitive to the younger me, who potentially thought this could be the best, most daring move ever made, so I’ll analyze this as gently as I can.
The movie follows Jill, a teenage girl whose parents make her babysit for a wealthy family as punishment for exceeded her cell phone minutes limit. The children are sick and asleep upstairs and there’s an au pair living there named Rosa. Why Jill’s services are needed and how this is considered a punishment, I’m not totally sure - all she needs to do is sit there and watch TV.
Soon after the parents leave, she begins receiving threatening phone calls on the family’s landline. She eventually contacts the police, who recommend she keep the creepy caller on the phone for 60 seconds so they can trace his source. And, as it happens, the police inform her the calls are coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE.
Hilarity ensues.
It’s important to note that when I was a kid, all unknown numbers pinging my cellphone belonged to kidnappers, and I was their primary target. In this movie, Jill gets about 40 anonymous phone calls – all of which come from a home intruder who’s trying to kill her. That would’ve really screwed me up. If I had a Letterboxd account back then, I would’ve written in my review: “Very relatable… too realistic.”
But now, all I’m thinking after watching Jill pick up the phone and say “Hello?” 300 times for 80 minutes, is that this was a colossal waste of my time. It’s made exponentially worse by the fact that the sound mixing department jacked up the volume on the ringing and dial tones, presumably because they thought it would be scarier, but instead it’s just annoying. Outside of that not very good idea, this movie barely has any other ideas for sources of suspense. In fact, I’ve never seen a movie rely on the same not-very-good ideas as many times as this one. The-thing-making-the-spooky-noise-was-actually-the-cat is a jump scare that gets used at least twice.
Another thing that would’ve really scared me is the fact that Jill is without her cell phone during this whole ordeal. Her parents confiscated it after she exceeded 800 minutes, which is… a lot of minutes. Unlike Jill, I didn’t have bonfires to go to or Bobby’s to call, so I was nowhere near pushing even 10 minutes on any given month. But I would have easily cut off contact with all my friends if it meant keeping my phone and staying alive.
But Jill still has a phone – the landline of the family she’s babysitting for – which she can pick up, carry around and clip to her low rise jeans, much like a cell phone. Further, she uses it to call the police, who rescue her at the end of the movie. I would have been just fine.
I just want to leave my younger self with a few more thoughts – some much-needed closure – before we’re done with this movie forever.
The actor that plays Jill kinda looks like Joe Jonas.
Any movie, no matter how crappy, can have a great Hollywood fun fact. This movie features Tessa Thompson’s very first movie role! You have no clue who that is yet, but she’ll be a pretty big star in a ton of movies, like Creed, which you won’t watch but you’ll reference to sound cool, and Annihilation, which you’ll watch but forget immediately.
Don’t miss this crucial point: the stranger just put on an absolute clinic in proper babysitting. “Have you checked the children?” is an important question he asks that aims to steer Jill back to the job at hand. She spends so much of the movie talking on the phone and hanging with her friend, all while she has two sick children under her care. Shout out to the masked intruder for teaching Jill about priorities.
Jill is told the calls are coming from inside the house, but there was enough evidence to suggest that already. She shouldn’t be so shocked.
Tiffany, Jill’s best friend, blames the fact that she kissed Jill’s boyfriend on…………Tequila! Dah-dah dah-dah-dah dah-dah dah. Dah-Dah dah-dah-dah dah dah.