The Caller, a.k.a. My Life Is On the Line (Canvas Media Studios, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the quality of A Deadly Threat to My Family, I was on my guard about the next movie on Lifetime’s schedule – originally shot under the working title The Caller but ultimately released as My Life Is On the Line – especially since imdb.com’s synopsis made it seem considerably less interesting than the cult movie: “Shannon works in the call center of a credit union, trying to balance work and an impending separation and custody battle, when one incoming call involves her in a fraud scam that threatens her job and family.” Shannon Cooper (Andrea Pazmino, whose Everywoman appearance makes her well suited to the role) does indeed work at the call center of Southwest Credit Union (we’re not told where it’s located, though the overall environment suggests L.A.) when she gets a call from a man who claims to be the husband of a credit-union customer who’s suffered a life-threatening accident, only the hospital where they’re at is denying her care because he doesn’t have the money available to pay them. (This is not quite accurate; a real hospital can’t legally deny care to someone in a genuine emergency, though their billing department can make your subsequent life a living hell trying to collect their fees from you and threatening you with garnishment and other forced collection techniques. It’s why an estimated half of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are over unpaid medical bills.) What’s more, when Shannon looks up the account online she finds that not only does her caller not know the four-character passcode for it, the account doesn’t have enough money to cover what the caller says he needs.

Shannon has the option to allow an overdraft, but only with the approval of her direct supervisor, a formidable and ice-cold bitch named Pilar Rose (Katelin Chesna), and at the moment Pilar has secreted herself in her private office with a young man named Tom (who isn’t listed on the film’s imdb.com page even though he’s a fairly important character) who does Shannon’s job. Though writer Neal Avram Schneider and director Geena Hernandez don’t specify this, we do get the distinct impression that Tom is Pilar’s boy-toy and their frequent meetings in her office are about something other than Southwest Credit Union. Pilar makes the point that she and Tom are not to be disturbed by drawing the Venetian blinds on her office windows. Shannon breaks protocol by authorizing the overdraft herself. Then she and her African-American colleague, Jamelia (Cheryl Pickett), get a call from her original caller’s wife complaining that her Southwest account has been frozen and she can’t conduct her business without access to it. Eventually we learn that Shannon’s original caller was scamming her; his wife was never in the hospital and he made up the story out of whole cloth just to scam Southwest out of the money and screw over the woman who was his wife, but with whom he parted under exceedingly unpleasant terms. If there’s one thing The Caller a.k.a. My Life Is On the Line does well, it’s dramatizing just how much the advent of computers has made white-collar work as demeaning and oppressive as anything on an assembly line. Shannon’s whole workday is given under the lash of various prompts keeping score of how many people she talks to and whether or not she gets them to take the post-call survey. She has a quota of 10 surveys per day and if she misses it, Pilar can fire her. (I’ve always blown off these requests for surveys myself, but if customer service representatives have to meet a quota of them to keep their jobs, maybe I’ll start doing them.)

Shannon keeps getting callbacks from the scam artist in a succession that reminded me of Blake Edwards’ 1962 thriller Experiment in Terror – in which a similarly low-level bank employee played by Lee Remick kept getting phone calls demanding that she embezzle a large sum of money or else the caller will kill her and rape her younger sister. I think Neal Avram Schneider way overdid the Kafka-esque succession of traumas he put Shannon through; not only is her marriage to Joel Cooper (Paul Sinacore) on the rocks, they’re seeing a mediator who’s demanding that Shannon take off work to attend joint sessions. The unseen mediator is threatening to revoke Shannon’s custody of their son Dylan (Emperor Kaioyus) if she doesn’t attend the sessions, and she also claims that the last time they met Shannon tested positive for benzodiazepine and that could be grounds for taking Dylan away from her and giving the boy to Joel. (Dylan’s parentage is a bit of a racial mystery because Emperor Kaioyus – how did he get such a ridiculous tongue-twister of a name? – looks at least part-Black while Andrea Pazmino and Paul Sinacore both present as white.) Schneider also gave the real culprit, Steve Wilson (José Eduardo Ramos), a preternatural knowledge of Shannon’s personal life, including the school Dylan attended, though I suspect we were supposed to believe he’d been able to research her because she’d stupidly given him her last name. At the end Steve actually shows up at the offices of Southwest Credit Union and threatens to claim that Shannon was his willing and premeditated accomplice.

Shannon also storms out of the office because Dylan hasn’t been seen since school let out, and she’s become convinced that Steve kidnapped Dylan – though it turns out the boy just decided to walk home. Pilar says that if Shannon leaves now, she’ll be fired – though, luckily for Pilar, Shannon returns to the office after she finds Dylan safe to pick up her stuff and is there to save Pilar when Steve shows up and physically attacks her. Earlier Pilar had told Shannon that years before a man trying to rob the credit union had stuck a steak knife into her and threatened to push it all the way in if she didn’t go along with his plan to rob the place – this was supposed to make Pilar seem a bit more human and also “plant” Steve’s assault on her in the ending. Ultimately the police show up and take Steve into custody, though Shannon still doesn’t get her job back and the implication is she’ll probably lose custody of Dylan because the mediator (ya remember the mediator?) had told her that the only reason she was letting Shannon keep Dylan was because Shannon had a steady job. Though not at the level of A Deadly Threat to My Family, The Caller a.k.a. My Life Is On the Line is a well-made thriller, and I strongly savored the irony that Shannon’s kind-hearted impulse is what does her in (not literally but in terms of her employment, her marriage and her son) at the end.