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For those who discovered your self awake within the wee small hours with private demons rattling in your mind, and also you picked up the telephone to share them with a affected person, impartial stranger, Tessa Thompson’s measured, calming voice is kind of precisely what you’d hope to listen to on the opposite finish of the road. As Beth, a night-shift volunteer for a disaster helpline, the actor’s naturally light, benevolent presence is the chief asset of Steve Buscemi’s minor-key chamber drama “The Listener” — not that she has a bunch of parts to compete with in what quantities, on display a minimum of, to a one-woman present.
Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, nonetheless, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of psychological well being illnesses as quirky dialog gas. Every anguished name that Beth takes, over the course of 1 lengthy, darkish night time of various souls, is written much less like a recognizable human change than as an actor’s heightened audition piece, and performed out as such by a voice-only ensemble stacked with distractingly recognizable names. Although the worldwide pandemic is simply by the way talked about, “The Listener” performs in all points like a challenge conceived in probably the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation period. It’s laborious to think about audiences desirous to enter that headspace now.
At a sure time after midnight, Beth — not her actual title, as we’ll quickly be taught — wakes up and units in regards to the morning rituals that almost all others gained’t start for a couple of hours. As soon as she’s stretched, washed and been suitably caffeinated, she places on her earpiece and will get to work, by no means leaving the comfortable, low-lit home she shares with a sleepy canine in a big, unspecified American metropolis. At this witching hour, the calls are available in a relentless stream: some temporary and comparatively benign, some lengthy and psychologically perilous. Regardless of the case, Beth handles it with the identical assured, soft-spoken sangfroid — a minimum of, till one explicit caller will get underneath her pores and skin.
That’s not simply completed. Within the house of some hours, she fields a variety of pretty upsetting calls from emotionally broken folks that, on this line of labor, are nonetheless enterprise as common. There’s a lonely ex-con (Logan Marshall-Inexperienced) nonetheless discovering his toes within the exterior world, triggered by masks necessities that remind him of his face-concealing legal previous. There’s the bipolar lady (Alia Shawkat), off her meds, whose wildly darting, disconnected concepts Beth suggests could possibly be shaped into spoken-word poetry. And there’s the embittered teenage incel whose professed hatred for the ladies who look previous him makes him not a lot a personality as an internet-drawn archetype.
Screenwriter Alessandro Camon (an Oscar nominee for “The Messenger,” whose director Oren Moverman takes a producer credit score right here) writes all these encounters with a considerably theatrical verbality that by no means fairly rings true. Just a few callers articulate their issues in a handy, nailed-on therapyspeak that sounds significantly synthetic in dialogue with Beth’s unwavering empathy; at a sure level, even the pauses and stutters in dialog start to sound studied.
Issues take a reasonably extra compelling flip when a pointy, intellectually combative lady (voiced in cut-glass tones by Thompson’s “Passing” director Rebecca Corridor) comes on the road saying her intention to kill herself, and virtually daring Beth to speak her out of it. The talk that ensues — throughout which Beth drops her personal guard, disclosing vulnerabilities of her personal — isn’t far more authentic-sounding than something that precedes it, however a minimum of has the ring of high-stakes audio drama. It’s a late peak, nonetheless, for viewers whose endurance could not match Beth’s.
Directing his first function for the reason that 2007 Sienna Miller car “Interview,” Buscemi oversees proceedings with a gentle if not particularly distinctive hand, whereas he and editor Kate Williams are loath to ratchet up rigidity in a way akin to such static however dynamic phone-based dramas as “Locke” and “The Responsible.” Anka Malatynska’s good-looking, burnished lensing helps issues, sustaining a warmly shadowed night-owl glow as Beth drifts from room to room of her residence, adjusting the sunshine in each as she goes. You sense these conversations couldn’t occur in a manifestly daylit name heart: Generally social distancing has its benefits.
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