User Reviews

Movie that got my complete attention. The story is surprising. Genuine and progressive performance. However, the scene after the credits is illogical and affected the plot. The present antagonist would have no way of making the call. And would have no way of knowing that her version of the past has died. After all, if she from the past died ... She from the present would not exist to do anything. I wouldn't mind having a sad ending, but that ending doesn't make sense. If it had ended up in the cemetery, it would have been consistent and still sad because of the people who died and the traumatic situation of the mother and daughter.

Great and tense dual time thriller/horor (not the scary type), ruined by an illogical twist that comes after the credits start rolling. If you turn it off after the end credits start, you're in for a near perfect watch.

WARNING - SPOILER !!!

Why did the older Young-sook disappear mid killing older Seo-yeon in 2019 if she didn't die after the fall, as suggested in the midcredit's scene where she calls her younger self to warn and results in Seo-yeon's mother disappearing in 2019.

The movie subverts the viewer's expectations by depicting a troubled protagonist trying to mask their own guilt. To understand the film, it is important to distinguish the protagonist's perspective and point of view with their actual predicament. Although the film may leave more to be desired, it does a great job misleading the viewers while subtlety revealing it's cards.

The film centers around the point of view of the protagonist, who in actuality is severely delusional and has borderline personality disorder (although this is projected by the protagonist onto her imaginary caller, I will get to this shortly). The protagonist has an underlying repressed childhood trauma caused by accidentally killing her father in a house fire. As a coping mechanism she convinces herself to believe in alternate realities, those in which she is innocent victim. This is most evident when she blames her own mother for her father's death. She believes that her mother was responsible for the fire, thus resenting her even late into adulthood. The mother burdens this pain, despite being on her deathbed caused by brain cancer, as she doesn't want to cause her child's mental health to further deteriorate. However as we later to come realize, her mother is truly innocent while the protagonist was actually responsible for her killing her father. And deep down in her repressed shadow, she understands this.

As the protagonist returns to her childhood home, she notices a hidden basement, a chair in the center with her old toys, along with a box left behind by the past tenants. This is when her mental state really becomes FUBAR. She imagines the stairs leading to the basement to be smoldering in flames, symbolizing that she cannot let go of burning her house and father to ashes.

Recall that when she first arrives to the home she loses her phone. She uses the find my phone app, and it reveals to be in the same location and is switched to the MRI brain scan. This may appear to be leading to next events, but it just retreads past events. The transition from phone to brain scan is illusory. She has her own phone and is just calling herself, it is revealed that she requires the phone but did she never really lost it is all just in her head. Therefore, she is just calling herself repeatedly, this sets the narrative of the entire story. She is ultimately calling her own phone, and is just talking to herself. However, in her mind she believes that she is truly conversing with someone else in the past.

What does the person on the phone claim? SHE LIVES WITH HER MOTHER WITHOUT A FATHER (step-mother because she wants no blood relationship with her aside from her father), SHE HAS PERSONALITY DISORDERS, SHE CLAIMED THAT HER MOTHER TRIED TO KILL HER BY BURNING HER, SHE DESPISES HER MOTHER HOPING THAT SHE WOULD HAVE DIED. Sound familiar? It definitely should! The protagonist just substituted her mental image of her past self, onto her image of the past tenant of the house. They really only met once when the protagonist was a child. Yet being scared of her as a kid, ingrained the girl as a villain in the shadow of the impressionable kid. The villain is simply the shadow of the protagonist. Additionally, they share many similarities, since that is what the protagonist conceived of herself. Both can't drive cars, both use fire extinguishers as weapons (she explains to her mother how to use a fire extinguisher as a weapon which is the same method the girl in the past killed others), they have the same exact stencil outlining their hands leading to a perfect overlap. Further signifying that she is just interacting with herself.

Instead of coming to terms with her own past, she tires to undue her fathers accident by altering history. Yet no matter what occured the resulting outcome is set. She remains response for her fathers death, while her mother is responsible protecting her family. This is the only consistent in all the narratives she perceived. She realizes that she was infact the one that burned down the house yet repressed. The girl in the past is just her shadow, a projection of unwanted thoughts. She blames the other girl for killing her father, when in actuality it was her. While the mother was the one that saved her, and burdened herself with the pain. This is symbolized by the mother protecting the protagonist in the past and present by grabbing the blade hands on and talking out the villain. Thus saving her child from guilt and harm. Any supposed changes in the past were only temporary fixes and not consistent with reality. Aside from trivial things such as leaving behind time capsules, which may as well have been placed by the younger protagonist. Any big change is only superficial yet quickly deteriorated. The father may have "survived" for a while but ultimately died because of the protagonists decisions. The mother had terminal brain cancer, changing the past wouldn't have prevented this. Surprisingly she never made a change regarding her mother, such as getting an early screening etc. yet she still miraculously fantasized that her mother was no longer terminally ill. This reveals that the altered events never actually occured, and had no merit at all. It was all a figment of her wild imagination. She simply wanted a reality where her father was happy and she no longer had to scapegoat her terminally ill mother. But more importantly, she could begin to forgive herself. So what really happened in the end? The father died in the fire, maybe in that vary house considering its charred and dilapidated state. This resulted, in underlying trauma and personality disorder within the protagonist. The protagonist blamed the mother for their predicament thus resenting her all this time. As she returned to the house she is literally haunted by the past. By the time she realizes the truth, her mother passed on from brain cancer and was buried along with the father. She tried to have closure by spending time with her father and properly saying goodbye to her mother. However she is still struck with grief and untreated mental illness, thus showing her bound in the basement.

Or... You can be superstitious like the shaman mother and believe in supernatural phenomenon. You can believe that the girl in the past is actually cursed and able to talk with future spirits. You can believe that shes is a serial killer that got away with it while living in the house undisturbed. You can believe that the protagonist that convinced herself of being innocent of manslaughter is somehow perfectly sane and would perceive the rest of her past truthfully. You can believe that two girls that happen to be the same age with similar problems had conversations with each other decades apart. It's your call.

Even the cemetery ending was not good enough. The movie lost sense in the middle of too many plot twists. An ending with a paradox would be better: After Seo-yeon 'forgiving' her mother during the call with Young-sook, she would let Sook kill her younger version and go to jail forever. This would create a paradox. She doesn't exist in the future, so she never pick up the phone. Sook never saves her dad and is not saved by Seo-yeon as well. The movie starts all over again. The phone rings and Seo-yeon knows exactly what to do: Never pick up the phone (and then let the audience create a theory that she repeated all process until her dad is saved and then she let Sook die LOL)

I did enjoy watching the movie. It's about a young woman who gets a call from 1999 and then can give this past woman info about what will happen to her in the same house. The pacing is fine, the acting fine, and the plot does move forward in all scenes. It's a fun movie to watch a single time and it does a few new things in this simple horror setting. It's basically a reboot of Frequency (2000) and instead of a fast-paced comedy, action, and detective story it mostly leans into horror and mystery. The genre change also means that it can rely on horror and mystery over plot, and that it does.

The main issue is that about 1 hour into the movie it jumps the shark. Before that it was a slow-burn mystery. We have a lot of mystery calls and both characters slowly figuring out what is what. The past woman saves present woman's father's life. In return she looks up when the past woman died and saves her life by warning her about her mother. All really cool! Great movie so far! Then past woman starts killing people one by one. That's the reason her mom wanted to kill her she knew she was a psychopath. Now that she is alive she keeps killing. Present woman tells her she is aghast on the phone. She can't believe she saved a serial killer! She tells her she will get arrested and spend her life in prison. Of course past woman wants to know how she is found out. Present woman refuses to answer and hangs up! After that she just keeps having fun with her alive dad.

So yeah, this is predictable. You have a serial killer who you just told will get arrested and spend her life in prison. This serial killer has access to you and your parents in the past. You refuse to give her any info to save her. Hell, you even know that both past you and your parents constantly visited the house as they ended up buying it. So any viewer with over 2 brain cells knows exactly what will happen. The serial killer will try to contact present woman to save her own life. She will kill both her parents and injure present woman while writing messages into the house itself so that present woman can read them. And she will keep doing this stuff until present woman finally pick up the phone and give her the info to avoid arrest. Anyone anywhere would understand that this would happen as even a non-serial killer would do similar stuff to save her own life let alone a freaking murderer who kills for fun. And lo and behold this is exactly what happens. Like, what am I as the viewer missing here? Why is the script suddenly this lazy? The horror genre is just forced into a time travel story out of nowhere so that you can put a horror tag on the movie and sell it to a less critical audience. But it's lazy writing. The writers are supposed to make the characters realistically smart not rely on their stupidity to force a plot. Present woman could tell past woman a false arrest date and avoid all of this. Just tell her she will be arrested in a year while she's arrested the next day. Give her false hope - done.

The movie feels like a suspense TV show with a great first season. Then the second season is written later to complete the story. But it's rushed and the writers wanted to try out a new genre. When you see that you don't want to watch season 3. The present woman is just putting herself in pointless danger so you don't feel anything for her. You actually are surprised she even survived while being this stupid. There are also more stupid scenes in the second part making the past woman win some fights. Like the present woman's mom in the past getting info from her over the phone to run out of the house. So what does she do? Well, she of course does the most insane thing possible: starts explaining loudly that someone just called her and begged her, while crying, to get out of the house as otherwise she would be murdered. Instead of stepping out of the super creepy house after getting the call she decides to act totally clueless for a moment. These moments become so numerous that you get tired of the stupidity. But overall the movie was a fun enough watch for sure. Just frustrating. The first hour was great enough. Second part lame. Overall decent horror.

Watched this with Indy as a Halloween movie.

First of all ... it's not a Halloween movie. It's at best a thriller with some gory bits thrown in.

Second of all ... it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I suppose it's best not to try and think about time-travel movies too much because they rarely make sense - but this one was glaringly poor. Sometimes actions in the past would affect the present and sometimes they wouldn't ... for no apparent reason.

The story itself was quite promising and the transformation from poor trapped girl into a mental case was enjoyable.

Now ... I'd read the reviews on imdb that all said stop the film when the end credits appear. But my curiousity got the better of me and I let it run ... which confirmed that I should have stopped the film when the end credits appeared. The post-credit scenes are just stupid and confusing and helped to drag this film's score down a lot.

43/100.

WTF was that ending??? I guess some people don't know when to stop... It made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The movie is really interesting. It connects two people from past to present through a phone. Maybe time travel through call......:'' And they started changing their past and future by helping each other. But,things turn ugly when the girl from past becomes a serial killer then all the story goes smoothy for which I really loved this movie.

But at the end, what was that? If the Seo Yeon mother died in order to kill Young Sook how she is supposed to return in 2019?

Again how Young Sook supposed to call herself if she dead in past?

I'm not sure how to fully comprehend the ending timeline here. There are more questions than answers of course to the entirety of the call to begin with. But I guess the main two are:

1. How does the phone call connect from 1999 to present day? The viewers are suppose to take it as is I guess, no actual scientific nor paranormal explanation here, just happens as is.

2. So the timeline of the two characters continue to progress as is, there's no indication of the present Young-sook alerting herself in the past until the very end and that in itself is a whole conundrum because we see the mom throwing Young-sook over the balcony and then surviving so that Seo-yeon is able to find her mom alive at the cemetery, but then as they both leave the cemetery her mom flickers and disappears because Young-sook survives the fall also. Now if the mom survives with Seo-yeon, wouldn't they call the police or at least find out at some point that Young-sook didn't die so that she would remain a threat? We only have the past calling the present until the very end, where the one instance is Young-sook is calling herself in the past which is a reversal of this mysterious phone communication. How does this happen? Lets say she figured it out and can call herself in the past, how does she find the exact moment to call herself before the mom and the police arrives at the house? Because if both timeline are continually progressing in the past and the present, won't that moment in the past also have passed? And my conundrum here is how this ending is a miss because it doesn't validate the space time continuum sequence of events here. Either leave the ending as is with the mom being alive and Young-sook dead or mom dead because Young-sook never died.

Things need to add up even if we're left with a cliff hanger but unfortunately this cliff hanger ended up making no sense.

This movie combined the notebook and good old South Korean horror. It is intriguing that they show the butterfly effects: make changing decisions in the past & the consequences for the present and future. What if the person that you save turns out to be one that causes nothing but pain for others?

I read other reviews & I agree that the ending makes little sense. If your past self is killed then there is no way of re-writing history to change that.... Unless there is another time line in which another person involved alters it... Given the limited characters in the film there is nobody that would do that. I understand the film makers would like to make a sequel but come on at least give us a logical sense for this?!

Good scenario with twisted story. You can't really tell who is the real evil one. And for the last months this movie was one the best among those mediocre and boring movies.

Good plot (althogh feels little bit similar to Frequency), great action and everything done almost perfectly. I was about to be amazed by how this movie ended until the last scene ruins the movie.