Listen.
- "There's someone outside"— The inciting quote from the first episode.
Calls is a 2021 audiovisual mystery thriller drama series created by Fede Alvarez based on the French series of the same name. Released in its entirety in March on Apple TV+, the series is notable for featuring an All-Star Cast performing what is essentially a radio play in a streaming format, harkening back to the days of stories as told by entertainers such as Orson Welles. The series stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily Collins, Ben Schwartz, Karen Gillan, Aubrey Plaza, Clancy Brown, and more.
Told through an anthology format and an interconnected series of phone conversations, the series follows various strangers whose lives are thrown into volatile disarray in the lead up to an apocalyptic event.
The show has been advertised as allowing, "audiences to experience short stories through real-life audio sources and minimal visuals."
This Work Contains Examples Of:
- Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Tim and Sara are separated due to Tim's profession and he has since started dating his manager, Camila. All seems well in the ending after the reality-altering machine is turned off, however.
- Alien Sky: How Dr. Wheating describes the sky after the machine affects reality on a critical level.
- Apocalypse How: Class Z. After the activation of Dr. Wheating's machine, it almost leads to the end of literally everything. Luckily, he's able to make a call back in time and get his past self to turn off the machine.
- Bookends: The series begins and ends with a conversation between Tim and Sara. However, in the final call, Tim shows up to surprise Sara for New Years, something which didn't happen in the original call. This implies the reality reset worked.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Everyone who gets 'corrected' by the universe. Thanks to the format of the series, it's up to the viewer's imagination when characters start going into long descriptions of bones breaking, faces melting, arms stretching. You get the idea.
- Death of a Child: Since Skylar's meddling affects her brother's fate as a twelve-year old as well as her mom's, she can only listen to the sounds of his very brutal and messy death.
- Disappeared Dad:
- Mark's dad left shortly before he was born, and Mark unintentionally follows in his footsteps when he calls forward in time to find his future self has abandoned his pregnant wife, his friends, and his family. Oh, and it's soon revealed that Mark's dad died overseas and had no idea of his birth.
- Dr. Rachel Wheating's dad (who is simply referred to as Dr. Wheating) left both her and her mother when she was young due to his focus on his work and his dismissal towards Rachel's dreams of becoming a physicist.
- Divorce Is Temporary: Katherine's husband Craig has filed for divorce sometime before the events of their episode, but she refuses to sign the papers out of hope of working things out.
- Drone of Dread: The sounds associated with the universe's corrections are accompanied by this.
- Hate Sink: While many characters across the series are portrayed in at least a slightly gray manner, Alexis from Pedro Across The Street is displayed profiling the next-door neighbor as a terrorist simply because he's Latin-American, is dismissive towards her partner for simply calling in, and is eventually revealed to have been sleeping with Pedro and attempted to throw him under the bus. It's no surprise that Patrick cuts ties with her and flees with the money to South America.
- Hell Is That Noise: Whenever things start getting spooky, the call distorts with extremely otherworldly sounds.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Floyd waits inside and gives directions to Darlene and her sister to escape the the drunken, shotgun-wielding, past version of him. This results in his demise via the police arriving on the scene and under the impression he's currently a threat.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The series pretty much sells itself on this, with everything that goes on from a visual standpoint being up to viewer interpretation.
- Reset Button: Dr. Wheating is able to convince his past self to turn off the machine, rebooting the universe. The first few minutes are played at the end of the final episode and altered slightly to show this better future.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: Both Tim and Layla are portrayed sympathetically and are shown to have remorse over their cheating nature. Layla is especially sympathetic due to how she ends up at the end of her chapter.
- What Year Is It?: Many characters ask this question at various points in the series to deduce which versions of their loved ones they are calling.
- You Can't Fight Fate: A major plot point. Those who are called from people in the future end up dying horrifically painful deaths as the universe corrects their fate.
