Writer-director Michiel Blanchart’s Night Call is set against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter protests in Belgium, which offers Mady (Jonathan Feltre), the young locksmith at the center of the film, a neat and tidy reason for not going to the police after killing a man in self-defense. The victim is the real tenant of the apartment that a young woman named Claire (Natcha Krief) duped him into opening so she could steal a pile of cash. After dialing the cops, Mady quickly hangs up after seeing the demonstrations on the news, at which point one could be excused for thinking that our hapless hero has only just remembered that he’s Black.
Putting aside that Mady’s reluctance to get the police involved isn’t a terribly novel setup for a thriller, Night Call makes little effort to engage with how his race affects how he moves through Brussels. Certainly it figures into the initial scuffle: There’s a pointed close-up of a swastika on the apartment mantelpiece, so this young Black man’s pleas were always bound to fall on deaf neo-Nazi ears. But where a more thoughtful film might contrast how the world sees Mady with how it perceives Claire, a white woman, or even the white male gangsters who force him to help track her down, Night Call proceeds with little to distinguish it from its contemporaries.
Blanchart’s film often feels like a patchwork of half-developed ideas (like Claire benefiting from pinning the blame on Mady), each more loosely and tenuously woven into the whole than the last. Night Call isn’t devoid of suspense and clever developments, like Mady getting to exert power over Claire inside a nightclub’s basement, or the moment in which he’s thrown into the same police car as one of his pursuers (Jonas Bloquet). But the tension of those scenes is defused so abruptly that you wonder if the filmmakers ran out of ideas for what the characters should do next. Unwilling or unable to extrapolate from the uneasiness promised by its premise, Night Call is a thriller that frustratingly feels that no follow-through is required.
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