What if you lend a helping hand to someone only for it to be bitten? One of the best thrilling movies of its time, titled The Caller, did amazingly well with the viewers. The film had the viewers bound to their seats, gasping as they anticipated the movie’s end. Viewers clutched their pearls as twist after twist came during the movie’s duration. Directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman, the film stars Malcolm McDowell in a mysterious caller’s role and Madolyn Smith Osborne in the Widow or the girl’s role in the film.
Written by Michael Sloane, the movie focuses on the thrilling plot line of a windowed woman living in an isolated cabin allowing a mysterious man to use her cell phone, thus starting a mystery that had the viewers glued to the screen till the end. Released on December 27, 1989, the film got distributed by Empire Pictures. The film focuses on a mysterious man joining a woman in an isolated cabin after his car supposedly breaks down.
The mysterious man and the woman both have their own stories, and they try to scare each other off till the end. Produced by Frank Yablans and Charles Blad, the film was way ahead of its time with its gripping twists that left the audience craving more.
The Caller had a run time of 97 minutes, with each minute feeling like a second with the fast-paced twists, which left the viewers confused till the end about the victim between the two suspicious figures.
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The Caller Ending Explained: Did The Woman Get Past The Caller?
The film starts with a woman arriving in the middle of the woods to discover an abandoned car with suspicious items, including a broken doll in its dashboard. The woman returns to her cabin in an isolated area in the wood with dripping blood presented. While the woman exercises and showers, she is watched by an unknown figure.
The viewers get to see the woman’s cabin filled with loving picture frames featuring her husband and a little girl presumed to be her daughter. After the woman is finished with her shower, she calls an unknown person and asks them to connect her with her daughter. She converses with her daughter telling her to be a good girl and say her prayers.
After hearing a voice, she comes out of her cabin in her garage to find her truck’s tires slashed with shards of glass lying around. From the film’s beginning, the woman appears to be eccentric and wild. While cutting vegetables for dinner, she ends up hurting her finger.
As the woman starts to iron her clothes, there is a knock on the door, and she opens it to find a mysterious man. The mysterious man and the woman converse, and the man requests the woman asking her to use her telephone to call a tow truck as his car broke down in the middle of the woods.
Initially, the woman is skeptical about the man, but after some convincing, she allows him to use the telephone. The mysterious man has the habit of apologizing for causing inconvenience for the woman, and this starts to ick her within no tie. The mysterious man makes his call, but the phone call doesn’t connect.
The woman begins to become suspicious of the man after he makes the phone call without looking up the number, but he assures the woman that he saw the number in his car before asking for help.
The man asks the woman about the address to inform the tow truck about his pick-up location, and she gives it to him after some bickering as she is scared of the mysterious man’s behavior.
The woman reminds the mysterious man about her expecting company to keep him away from herself. As the pair continues to talk, the Caller decides to leave and wait for the tow truck to arrive at the woman’s cabin. The woman calls the Caller back inside as she feels bad for him and the weather is disastrous outside.
As the pair continue to indulge in mind games, it gets out that the woman lives alone at the cabin. The Caller becomes suspicious after the woman’s said company doesn’t arrive at the cabin. The pair questions each other in hopes of finding inconsistencies in the other one’s story.
In a twist, the woman reveals that she was the one behind the Caller’s accident in hopes of her luring him to her cabin in order to end his life. The Caller reveals that he is a cop there to investigate her as she was accused of ending the life of her husband and daughter. In reply to the Caller’s accusations, the woman replies that her husband died in the war.
The pair get into several altercations, which end with them making out with each other. As the pair starts to get closer to having sex, the man suddenly stops and leaves before sex. The cabin is mysteriously set on fire after the Caller leaves the woman behind. The Caller returns to save her life before informing her about her being the killer of her family members.
The woman starts denying the accusations, and the Caller tells her to call the Sheriff s office to know the truth. The Caller and the woman continue to confront each other with different facts they know about each other.
Did The Woman Get Past The Caller?
As the pair continues to bicker between them, it becomes clear to the viewers that the pair are in a long-term relationship and are playing a game of role-playing with each other. In the climactic revelation, it gets revealed that the woman was a prisoner held in the cabin for the observation of her behavior.
It also gets revealed that the Caller isn’t an actual human but a robot designed to watch the woman in close proximity. The final revelation is that the woman was earning points to gain her freedom. Every time she would catch one of the lies told by the Caller, she would end up earning a point.
In order to gain her freedom, the woman needed to get past the Caller, as every other altercation between the pair was made to make it possible for the woman to earn her freedom.
The mysterious man is the Caller in the film, and the woman needs to get past him to earn her freedom. The woman fails to get past the Caller, and the actual mysterious man takes her back to the cabin, informing her she failed to earn her freedom, and she is given another chance to earn her points.
The actual mysterious man appears in the end and informs the woman that he didn’t know that a robot would be capable of having feelings. The film ends with the two repeatings their game as the mysterious man returns to the cabin pretending to be a Sheriff.
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