The Phone Call
2013 · 20m · UK
Directed by Mat Kirkby
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Heather, a shy crisis-helpline worker, takes a call from Stanley, a grieving widower contemplating suicide, and must try to keep him on the line. Over the course of a single phone conversation she fights to reach him, weighing empathy against her duty to intervene.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the suicide hotline film to milk the emotional reveal—but Kirkby refuses; he traps us in Sally Hawkins's face for 20 minutes and somehow that constraint becomes the subversive move, stripping away every cheap manipulation we thought was coming.
A disciplined formal exercise in the tradition of chamber drama and radio plays, where the absence of the other voice becomes a deliberate compositional choice—Hawkins's micro-expressions do the work of two-hander dialogue, situated squarely in a lineage of constraint-as-craft.
The entire film lives in Hawkins's eyes and the specific decision to never cut away from her face—one actor carrying the emotional architecture of a conversation, which forces a kind of listening performance that most films never attempt, let alone nail on this budget.
Reviews
Sally Hawkins plays Heather as someone meek yet with a deep empathy she uses to reach out to Stanley any way she can; most of the runtime is focused on her side of the conversation, and the actress more than carries it through, each expression telling a thousand words.
In the spirit of such feature-length greats as MY DINNER WITH ANDRE and MASS, this is yet another example that characters simply sitting around talking can be as riveting as any number of visual stimuli.
Festivals
- Academy Awards 2015, Best Live Action Short Film (Winner)
- BAFTA Awards 2015, Best British Short Film (Nominee)
- Tribeca Film Festival 2014, Best Narrative Short (Winner)