From his Denver home, arrogant right-winger Brent Ziff (Abe Goldfarb) hosts a popular livestream trafficking in conspiracy theories and other hot-button topics — you know, loves crypto, hates pronouns. It’s the kind of show where phrases like “big simp energy” get uttered on the reg. Twenty minutes in, he connects with a longtime listener, First Time Caller.
That would be Leo (voiced by Brian Silliman, Men in Black: International), who points Brent to a feed of a concert in Seattle, because in a few minutes, it will be wiped out by a surprise tsunami. Brent figures Leo for yet another crackpot … until the unexpected event actually occurs. According to Leo, his words aren’t predictions, but proclamations.
And his psychic gift feels like a massive bowel movement, so there’s one thing Matt Damon’s similar soothsayer in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter didn’t have.
Although slick in production, First Time Caller lacks more than a hyphen. At an abbreviated 75 minutes, it’s essentially a real-time exercise of two people conversing in one room, and our eyes meet only one end of the line. (Comedians Greg Proops and Kevin Pollak play other callers in brief spoken cameos.) No matter how much co-directors Goldfarb and J.D. Brynn gussy up the screen — notably with superimposed audio patterns — the situation isn’t arresting enough to sustain itself.
The movie’s biggest handicap is not that Brent is an exceedingly obnoxious, even odious character. (Although he is.) It’s that this concept’s legs are built to stand as a short film, a short story or perhaps a single episode of TV or a podcast. (In fact, this is based on a podcast called The Earth Moves, two eps at 53 minutes total.) Once Brent and Leo start speaking in circles, the more obvious First Time Caller is biding time until reaching its shit-or-get-off-the-pot conclusion. We want to see the story through — just without several trips ’round the same ol’ mulberry bush.
Compare Brent to shock jock Barry Champlain of Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio: Barry (Eric Bogosian) is every bit as unlikable, right down to his venomous political views and haughtiness toward everyone else. Even with markedly lower stakes and an extra half-hour, Talk Radio is more compelling because Bogosian’s script gives Barry what Brent sorely lacks: multiple points of conflict with multiple characters. Or in short: subplots. —Rod Lott