Beth (Sarah Booth) is a single mom fretting over the whereabouts of her young son. She is on her way to her job as a late-shift janitor at a suicide center. Her phone is dying and she can’t get through to her kid who went to a movie with a friend. When she gets inside the office, her distraction over her son’s unreachability shows when she forgets to turn off the building’s alarm.
After leaving messages everywhere, she settles in to clean the many rooms and halls in this center. Then an office phone rings, and with the thought that it might be her boy or someone who knows something, she answers it. But it turns out to be a drunk, lonely fellow, Scott (David Wilkins), who is feeling suicidal and was hoping to speak with a counselor. Since there are none available, Beth does her best to keep Scott from killing himself, despite no special training in intervention.
This kind of thing has been done before on film and requires some strategy about how to present two characters talking to one another about life and death at a distance. The award-winning short The Phone Call, starring Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent, solved the problem by presenting Broadbent’s suicidal man as a disembodied, ever-weakening voice talking over the phone to a distressed Hawkins, whom we could see.
In Last Call, filmmaker Gavin Michael Booth splits the screen mostly horizontally, so we’re watching Beth and Scott try to communicate. The film proves harrowing and sad, but always energized by the two, parallel yet intertwined scenes of action happening in real-time. Last Call is a novelty, yes, but a powerful one. Strongly recommended.