Director/Screenplay – Pål Sletaune, Producer – Turid Øverseen, Photography – John Andreas Andersen, Music – Fernando Velazquez, Production Design – Roger Rosenberg. Production Company – Pandora Film/BOB Film Sweden/SF Norge/NFP*/NRK/The Match Factory/Norskfilinstitutt/HessenInvest Film/Eurimages/Nordisk film og TV Fond/Svenska Filminstituet/The Media Programme of the European Union.
Cast
Noomi Rapace (Anna), Kristoffer Joner (Helge), Vetle Qvenild Werring (Anders), Stig Amdam (Ole), Maria Bock (Grete), Torkil Johannes Swensen Høeg (The Boy Next Door), Henrik Rafaelsen (Male Doctor)
Plot
Anna is moved into an apartment block in Oslo by social services, along with her eight year-old son Anders. Anna has fled from her abusive husband after seeing the violence he inflicted on Anders. However, the social workers warn Anna that she is being overprotective of Anders, letting him sleep in her bed, and that she must take him to school. Placing him in his own bed, Anna buys a baby monitor to look over Anders as he sleeps. However, after turning it on, she can hear horrible screams coming through even though Anders is asleep. She returns to the store where the assistant Helge tells her that the screams could be coming from a different channel, which might be being picked up from another apartment in the building. As Anna develops a cautious friendship with Helge, the social workers intrude further into her life and threaten to return Anders to his father, while insisting that she has imagined or made up many of her claims.
Norwegian director Pål Sletaune first appeared with Junk Mail (1997) about a sociopathic mailman, which did the round of international festivals to reasonable acclaim. Sletaune went onto other darkly funny films such as You Really Got Me (2001) and the surreal, reality-bending Next Door (2005) in which Kristoffer Joner becomes involved with two neighbouring women in his apartment, and more recently created the tv mini-series 22 July (2022) about the true-life Anders Behring Breivik shooting spree. Babycall was his fourth film. Babycall is the Norwegian phrase for a baby monitor – in the US, the film was released as The Monitor.
The setting that Sletaune chooses seems dull and lifeless, bled of almost all colour. The apartment building is a large anonymous box-like block. The hallways are dull and unassuming, while the inside of Noomi Rapace’s apartment is all featureless cream-coloured walls – where the only decoration is the poster that son Vetle Qvenild Werring keeps moving between rooms and his drawing of the apartment on the fridge. This comes in contrast to the apartment in Next Door, which was given life through colour and lighting.
Babycall was sold as more of a horror film than Next Door, which slotted far more easily into Lynchian surrealism. That said, for all the premise’s hook about haunted sounds coming though the baby monitor, Babycall is never much of a horror film. Sletaune does get some undeniable effect with the scenes when Noomi Rapace turns the monitor on and starts to hear screams coming through and then goes into son Vetle Qvenild Werring’s room only to find him sound asleep. On the other hand, there are never any other such scenes throughout and the calls from the baby monitor do not substantially feature again.
A distressed Noomi Rapace
Although it has the ostensible pitch of a horror film, Baybycall is not dissimilar to Next Door in many ways. Both have the setting of an apartment building and one apartment where there appears to be a shifting sense of what is real. There is also Kristoffer Joner as the lead male in both stories who is drawn in to involvement with women where he cannot be sure what is really happening.
Babycall becomes like a version of Repulsion (1965) made for the M. Night Shyamalan era. Noomi Rapace sees things where we are not exactly certain what is what – someone seeming to move a body bag into a van in the parking garage and in later scenes a person who appears to bury a body in the woods. There is then the suggestion that the driver of the van might be the male social worker (Stig Amdam) who has apparent sexual designs on Noomi. There is the constant accusation that Noomi imagined or made up the abuse by her husband, with even her son Vetle, the recipient of the abuse, saying so. There is Vetle’s mystery school friend (Torkil Johannes Swensen Høeg) who comes home with him, says nothing and then is mysteriously vanished from his room later.
In the most unsettling scene, Noomi visits a beach in the woods and then later takes Vetle out to see it – only to discover that over the rise where there was a small lake earlier is now a parking lot. Or when Kristoffer Joner visits, encounters the mystery school friend and believes him to be Anders, only to see bruises on his body and become horrified that Noomi left them. Later Noomi finds the bruises on Vetle’s skin where he enigmatically replies “They’re not mine.”
The end of the film is a traditional M. Night Shyamalan Conceptual Reversal Twist [PLOT SPOILERS] where we see that much of what happened was in Noomi Rapace’s mind. Equally though, it is also an ending that, just like Next Door, leaves you unclear as to exactly how much was and wasn’t real. How much of the other boy is ghost or imagined? And exactly how much regarding the social workers was real or imagined? It is these very enigmatic mysteries that makes Pål Sletaune’s films fascinating.
