PLOT SUMMARY: When Seo-yeon moves back into her childhood house, she finds a cordless phone that connects her to a woman who lived in the house twenty years ago.
What seems like a small incident, can have such a big impact in our lives. It may just be a small error, carelessness really, but it could surmount and send ripples throughout our life. That is why we are always told to proceed with caution and to always be careful with what we wish for.
Now imagine the small mistake we made years ago, could be fixed. That would undeniably change the course of the present, and maybe it could make our life better.
If there was a way we could fix something that happened in our past and one that irrevocably changed our lives and the way we were shaped, wouldn't we take that chance?
But what if the only way one could do it was by taking a favor from someone and the minute that you do, wouldn't you owe them?
A perplexing situation indeed.
THE CALL/KOL Movie Plot
The movie begins with Seo-yeon visiting her sick mother at the hospital and watching her paint her nails. Seo-yeon has been told that her mother's illness is terminal and that the cost of the treatment will be too much.
Her mother senses her distraction and tells her that a friend could help with the insurance. When Seo-yeon acts surprised, her mother then tells her that she would need to talk to the priest to see if she could be buried next to her dead husband or with him.
Seo-yeon looks at her in disbelief and asks why she would even think she deserved to be buried near her husband.
Her mother looks hurt as the daughter walks away.
Later Seo-yeon is dropped off to her childhood home which is in bad shape. She lost her phone sometime during her travel here but luckily finds a cordless phone in the house.
Seo-yeon is going around the house when the phone rings and it is a woman asking for help as her mother is torturing her. She asks her to come this instant. Seo-yeon obviously thinks it's a prank call and thinks nothing of it.
She takes a nap and we see that she has burn scars on her leg. We have to assume her mother had something to do with it which is why there's so much friction in their relationship.
She gets a call again and the woman is desperately asking for help. Seo-yeon asks who she wants to speak to and it's for another woman. Seo-yeon assures her she is not her.
Another wrong call later and Seo-yeon finds out the woman's name is Oh Young-sook and that she lives in the same address.
Seo-yeon is shocked but then investigates around the house and finds a teddy bear and a diary and other things that purportedly belong to Young-sook.
Her suspicions are confirmed in the next call along with the shocking discovery that the two women are conversing with each other even though they are living in different timeliness.
At first Young-sook doesn't believe her but when Seo-yeon reads from her diary and predicts a plane crash, Young-sook believes her and also realizes that any call she makes from the phone goes directly to Seo-yeon.
Young-sook's living conditions are shown. Her adoptive mother forces her to eat and behave and makes a comment about saving Young-sook from a life at a mental asylum. Young-sook is insolent and doesn't care much for her.
She does get excited to make calls to a woman in the future and the two girls connect when Seo-yeon makes her hear the latest song from a singer Young-sook is a fan of.
Twenty years later, and the singer is still holding concerts and jumping about on stage although Young-sook isn't overly thrilled by the techno sounds being used. Still, she's a fan and records the music while Seo-yeon plays it on YouTube.
Eventually the girls begin talking about personal issues and they connect over lost parents.
Then one day, a man and a young girl come over to look at the house. The young girl is curious and prancing around the house and is surprised to see something in the hallway. Before leaving, they ask Young-sook's mother to show them what's behind a door. She tells them that is her daughter's bedroom and reluctantly knocks on the door.
Young-sook opens it and and then is surprised to learn the young girl's name is Seo-yeon. She is elated and immediately calls the adult version. Seo-yeon gets teary-eyed when she hears her father's voice and her own. She tells Young-sook about the fire and Young-sook asks if there was a way she could stop it.
The plan is set in motion.
It is the day when Seo-yeon's mother is busy with applying nail polish on her nails rather than focus on something she left on the gas stove. Afterwards, she simply leaves the house while Seo-yeon is using her father's sleeping form as a table to have a tea party.
Young-sook enters the house with a key Seo-yeon's mother hid under the flower pot.
Adult Seo-yeon waits anxiously near the phone wondering if her life is going to be changed.
Suddenly, she notices her scars disappearing. And then she's thrust into a plane where there's darkness and embers.
In the next instant, Seo-yeon is in a brightly furnished house, in a lush garden, wearing a pretty dress...and her hair is long.
Apparently, Seo-yeon was so depressed she chopped off her hair. Turns out, if you're happy you get to have long hair. If you are depressed then the first thing anyone does is get a haircut.
This is evident in other movies as well. Whenever an actress faces any problems in her life, the first thing to go is her hair. Short hair is supposed to make someone look serious. I mean sure, it does help if you have short hair while performing action scenes but one can always tie up their hair, right?
Why can't the heroine keep her long hair when she's facing any problems in her life? And why does getting a haircut become a priority anyway?
Anyway, Seo-yeon sees her mother happy and healthy and working in a garden. Then she hears a familiar voice. It is her father.
Seo-yeon has a tearful reunion with her father and then later, on the phone, can't thank Young-sook enough. The latter also feels like a hero and accepts the thanks.
But Young-sook clearly begins to regret saving Seo-yeon's father's life because her friend begins to ignore her.
Seo-yeon is living a happy life with her parents in a pretty house filled with love. She doesn't call back and expects her friend to be okay with it.
What the poor thing doesn't realize is that Young-sook has mental issues. She begins to get angry.
Eventually Seo-yeon gets enough of staring at her family and watching them with doe eyes. The next time she hears the phone ring, she literally makes a run for it upstairs. Her parents don't bother to ask her why only she's allowed to use the phone. Or perhaps they are satisfied with their cellphones and cordless phones are pretty much obsolete now so they don't care.
Still, wouldn't they be a little curious as to who is calling on the landline number? But they're not and Seo-yeon enjoys the luxury of having her own phone. In this reality she doesn't lose her cellphone but has no use for it anyway.
The phone is picked up and Young-sook begins with a taunt first, somewhere along the lines of "oh, so you finally found the time to pick up my call."
Seo-yeon is unbothered. Her friend is supposed to be happy for her after all. She makes excuses before Young-sook begins to insult her. She did suffer a punishment at the hands of her mother when she saved Seo-yeon's father and therefore thinks she's entitled to all of Seo-yeon's time.
Seo-yeon starts to feel bad and then thinks her friend is joking when suddenly the mother's voice is heard. She drags Young-sook down for her punishment.
Seo-yeon feels bad for her friend and so conducts a research online and finds that Young-sook's mother is actually a shaman who is going to kill her adoptive daughter on the pretext of performing an exorcism.
In the next call, Seo-yeon warns Young-sook about what's about to happen as well as the date. It is today. Young-sook hides when her mother comes in with a knife and begins to stab at her pillows and Teddy bear. The Teddy bear doesn't survive and it is unclear if it vanishes from Seo-yeon's reality as well.
Young-sook kills her adoptive mother and feels free. Free enough to be a serial killer now.
The first thing she does is go shopping and then get a shocking pink wig.
Then she gets a visit from the strawberry farmer, the very one that have Seo-yeon a ride to the house and is best friends with her family.
Young-sook practically pulls him in and pretends to call for her mother. While she's being her crazy self, thd strawberry farmer sighs and decides to put away the order of strawberries away for her. He hopes he will be paid by the mother for the extra service.
But when he opens the fridge he finds several stinking black bags. He pulls one out to make space for the strawberries and then notices a puddle of blood forming underneath it. He opens it and finds chopped up fingers and scalp. He freaks out and this makes Young-sook return and sigh dramatically. Now she will have to kill him too.
In the present, Seo-yeon is having lunch with her parents and the strawberry farmer and accidentally has some juice fall on her sleeve. When she goes upstairs, she finds the stain disappearing. She goes downstairs and her parents have no idea they were having lunch with the strawberry farmer. In fact the whole menu has changed. No one in town eats strawberries any more after the farmer died all those years ago. Yup, the farmer has been killed in Young-sook's timeline.
But Seo-yeon is still not aware of what happened and runs to where the farms were only to find it in dire state. She goes to the police and none of them are aware the town had a strawberry farm except for one who wonders why she would want that information in the first place. He then gladly shows her the book of records.
THE CALL (also known as Kol) Ending Explained with Spoilers!
Seo-yeon soon enough finds out that her friend from the past is responsible for not only the farmer's murder but also her adoptive mother's. Young-sook had lied about reaching an understanding with her mother previously. So when she calls again, Seo-yeon wastes no time telling her she knows what she did as there was an article in the newspaper too regarding her arrest.
Young-sook doesn't care much for the accusations but does want to know how she gets arrested. Seo-yeon, upset that she won't be getting any fresh strawberries because of her, refuses to help her.
Young-sook isn't happy and reminds her that she can just as easily take away her family again. Seo-yeon has forgotten all about the timeliness and Young-sook's help. She ends the call leaving Young-sook in a foul enough mood to plan a murder.
She kills Seo-yeon's father just as th4 adult Seo-yeon is taking driving lessons from him. One minute he's there, the next minute he's turning into dust. Luckily Seo-yeon doesn't crash the car although she is taken into a reality where she has short hair again. Turns out if her father were alive only then she would have had long hair and wear pretty dresses.
Young-sook has taken young Seo-yeon captive and her mother goes around looking for.
Meanwhile adult Seo-yeon takes the call and agrees to help Young-sook after she's threatened. Not wanting to lose her mother too, Seo-yeon tells her that she dropped the knife at the murder scene which caused her to get caught.
In Young-sook's timeline, Seo-yeon's mother has come looking for her family with police officers. Young-sook manages to kill them and then chases the mother around who manages to lock herself in a room and use the phone.
Seo-yeon picks up the call and finds her mother on the other end. She tries to help her but Young-sook has a trick up her sleeve. She brings young Seo-yeon out and of course her mother leaves her hiding place to come help her.
Adult Seo-yeon feels helpless as her mother fights in the past trying to save her daughter and herself from a maniacal Young-sook.
But Young-sook didn't die in the past and so comes after adult Seo-yeon who gets to do some running around too.
Young-sook is still trying to stab young Seo-yeon and her mother when the mother pushes her in a room. Off screen there's a lot of commotion going on which ends with Young-sook emerging to kill young Seo-yeon but at the last second, her mother runs out and pushes herself against the murderer, causing them both to fall off.
In Seo-yeon's timeline, the adult Young-sook vanishes and Seo-yeon is left wondering if her mother survived.
She later goes to the grave and is weeping when her mother comes and Seo-yeon is elated to see her but does notice a scar on her neck which probably came from her scuffle with a serial killer years ago.
The mother and daughter think they've gotten their happy ending and walk away when suddenly the mother evaporates.
Later we get to see how old Young-sook was sly enough to call up her younger self and warn her about what was going to happen. The young Young-sook was able to save herself from the fall but remain hidden and possibly still murder people making certain she wasn't leaving behind any clues that would lead to her.
And so the first thing she does is kill Seo-yeon's mother.
In the scene after we see a person trapped under a sheet in the basement. It is revealed to be adult Seo-yeon.
We have to imagine that Young-sook remained hidden for years and then when Seo-yeon grew up, kidnapped her.
The movie ends.
The Call has an interesting take on timelines and does justice to the theme. The end credits scene is a bit confusing but the writer must have thought that he has educated us about timelines throughout the movie so we can now make our own conclusions about what we see in the end.
This is an edge-of-the-seat thriller that works because of its fast pace and remarkable acting skills by the actors.
Scare Scale: 3.5/5
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