The only location and single character film is tough to drag off. It requires lots of charisma, focus, and general curiosity for the operating time of a function movie to be fully profitable. Though motion pictures like Locke, This Is Not a Movie, Buried, and The Shallows have managed to mesmerize audiences, it’s a troublesome tightrope to stroll—particularly when you’re confined to 1 location and all of your consideration is on one performer.
Within the film On The Line, director Oliver Pearn falls actually quick in undertaking the feat, whereas his imaginative and prescient might need been higher served as a play or podcast as an alternative of a movie. Let’s speak about it.
Written and directed by Pearn (in his function movie debut), On The Line is ready on Alderney, United Kingdom, an island within the English Channel, in 1964. It follows Agnes, performed by Victoria Lucie (A Evening in 97, The Satan’s Machine), a brand new switchboard operator who serves because the lifeblood of the island connecting folks by means of cellphone traces. Her day is fairly typical with residents trying to join with companies and household, whereas she even will get the occasional prank cellphone name. The truth is, she even will get bored sufficient to eavesdrop on different folks’s conversations.
Nevertheless, her day is thrown into panic and disarray when an aged lady named Martha, voiced by Joanne Rogers, is attempting to flee from a suspected kidnapper. Anges has to attempt to discover her assist by pinpointing her location and alerting the authorities on the island. It’s simpler stated than finished since she has to coax info out of Martha with out drawing consideration from her would-be abductor.
Though On The Line is scrappy and resourceful, the filmmaker’s ambitions outweigh his execution in crafting a single location and single character film. There’s simply not sufficient there to maintain an viewers engaged, even with a brief 73-minute operating time. Whereas Lucie is improbable as Agnes, she’s underserved by the movie’s story and path.
In the meantime, the filmmaking isn’t essentially dynamic or sturdy, whereas the stakes don’t really feel like the middle of the world, and even the island. It ought to really feel prefer it’s life or loss of life with a great deal of stress and suspense, contemplating the subject material, nevertheless it simply left this author lukewarm and ho-hum. The top end result feels clumsy provided that Pearn is a first-time director.
However, Victoria Lucie is a breath of contemporary air as Anges. She’s vivid and charming as a brand new switchboard operator was the strongest a part of the movie, whereas it’s unlucky that the movie itself lets her down. However general, if On The Line calls, you need to hold up.
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