Park Shin-hye
Seo-yeon
The Call
“A call from a serial killer... She'll begin to hunt your past.”
2020
1h 52m
Director: Lee Chung-hyun
Overview
Connected by phone in the same home but 20 years apart, a caller puts a woman’s past — and life — on the line to change her own fate.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
4 min readThe Phone as a Time Machine
I’ve always been suspicious of thrillers that rely on a phone call to unravel their plot. It’s such a familiar device—think Sorry, Wrong Number or Scream—that it risks feeling like a crutch, a lazy way to inject tension into a story. But The Call, Lee Chung-hyun’s 2020 thriller, doesn’t just use the phone as a prop.
It turns it into a wormhole, a conduit between two women separated by two decades, each trapped in the same house but living in entirely different worlds. The film doesn’t just ask what you’d do if you could change the past; it forces you to watch as the past fights back, refusing to be rewritten without a fight.
The premise is deceptively simple: Kim Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye), a woman in her 30s, picks up a landline in her childhood home and finds herself talking to Oh Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo), a woman living in the same house 20 years earlier. At first, it’s a novelty—Seo-yeon warns Young-sook about an impending storm, and Young-sook, ever the skeptic, hangs up. But when Seo-yeon realizes that Young-sook is a serial killer, the game changes.
What begins as a desperate attempt to stop a murder spirals into something far more dangerous: a battle over who gets to control the narrative of their lives. The phone isn’t just a connection; it’s a weapon.
The film’s greatest strength is its refusal to treat time as a clean, malleable thing. Too many stories about altering the past operate on the assumption that change is linear—that if you fix one thing, everything else will fall into place. The Call knows better. Every adjustment Seo-yeon makes to Young-sook’s timeline sends ripples through her own life, some subtle, some catastrophic.
A missing person reappears, but with a new face. A relationship that never happened suddenly does. The film’s tension comes not just from the violence Young-sook inflicts, but from the way the past clings to Seo-yeon like a second skin, refusing to let go.
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe Call (2020): The House Phone That Bridged 20 Years
Two women. One house. One phone call across two decades. latestnetflix.com's read is that that hook is why Lee Chung-hyun's thriller keeps circulating years later.
The logline that sticks in listings is lean: connected by phone in the same home but 20 years apart, a caller puts a woman's past — and life, on the line to change her own fate 
. No elaborate mythology. Just proximity and timing turned lethal. The leads named everywhere are Park Shin-hye, Jeon Jong-seo and Kim Sung-ryung .
What the listings actually confirm
The paper trail here is short, and it's all core credits:
- Director: Lee Chung-hyun . He is also described as a South Korean film director and screenwriter known for thriller work, including the Netflix-released feature The Call (2020) .
- Stars: Park Shin-hye, Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Sung-ryung .
- Release footprint: listed as Digital, Nov 27, 2020 , and described elsewhere as a Netflix-released feature .
- Identity in French listings: Original title Kol, Country South Korea, Genre Thriller, Duration 112 min .
- Audience temperature at one database: Rating 6.6/10 from 1,489 votes .
That is the verifiable spine. Tight cast. Single director credit. Late-November 2020 digital arrival.
Why there is no real backstage dirt here
Bluntly: gossip coverage is thin. What surfaced in search was result titles, short snippets and URLs, not full reporting. There was no readable interview, salary note, onset anecdote or production timeline in the evidence provided.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ2BgE1eESA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk7HDcKxxYg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8eJ4HPE3hc
What does exist is explainer energy. YouTube entries point to a review framed around Park Shin-hye and Jeon Jong-seo , a cast-and-trailer roundup , and a review plus ending-explained video whose title teases a post-credit scene and how it sets up a sequel . Treat that sequel tease as unconfirmed chatter. Without watching the video or reading a full article, there is no way to verify what scene is meant or whether any follow-up was ever planned.
So file this one under high-concept, well-cast, still debated — but not scandal-documented. If you came for feuds and reshoots, they are not in the record supplied here.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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