The biggest hurdle an homage to classic film noir must overcome is developing a story that is more interesting than the novelty of using noir tropes and visual style. By sheer virtue of its 55-minute length, Dustin Kahia’s Call of the Void is at a disadvantage from the start. That’s not to say that you couldn’t craft an engaging story in that time frame, but Kahia’s minimal narrative and limited locations set the film up to as a spare, slow burn, with the requisite revelatory twist coming at the last minute. While shortening the project would help iron out some of the pacing issues, even then, Call of the Void struggles to be more than a low-budget rehash of ’40s and ’50s psychological noirs, cherry-picking tropes as if this were a film school genre exercise.
In the vein of classics such as Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place, Call of the Void‘s protagonist, Steve (Mojean Aria), is a writer. His dimly lit room is the main set, with the first half of the film consisting of Steve battling writer’s block and discussing a failed relationship with his psychiatrist. As much as possible, Kahia and cinematographer Peter Borosh make this virtually empty set visually intriguing. The stark contrast in the black and white image is key. The glint of Steve’s glass and his ashtray or the plumes of smoke wafting over his typewriter do their part to set the ’40s atmosphere. In these early scenes, Steve’s psychiatrist is never shown. Instead, we simply hear her disembodied voice, which only emphasizes Steve’s contentious reactions and isolates him further.
From what we glean in these sessions and through his conversations over the phone with Peter (James Morrison), Steve was in a relationship with Veronica (Ashley Clements), but his unpredictability drove them apart. In these scenes, Aria takes every opportunity to play up just how unhinged Steve is. Not only is he combative when his psychiatrist offers advice or discusses his short term memory loss but he’s erratic and jittery, the cigarette in his hand seeming more and more like the only thing keeping him from frantically flailing his arms around as he describes his continued obsession with Veronica. Kahia pointedly separates the first and second halves of Call of the Void with a rickety cab drive through downtown Los Angeles, as Steve, disregarding his psychiatrist’s advice on the matter, sets out to mend things with Veronica. Their reunion, however, turns into a violent confrontation with her new boyfriend, Tommy (JT Alexander). At least, that’s what Steve thinks happens.
Kahia’s script is riddled with genre clichés, but the biggest, most consistent offender is the dialogue. Tommy, a hard-boiled cop, is particularly unbelievable as a character as he coolly talks about shooting a guy between the eyes and actually says the words “This is South Central, baby.” It’s an odd blend of cold-hearted ’40s gangster and police abuse, all geared towards making us side with Steve. But that seems almost unnecessary considering we experience the entire film via Steve’s – albeit unreliable – perspective. Yet that’s the essence of Kahia’s story. As much as Call of the Void is about self-destructive obsession, the final, very abrupt twist and Steve’s subsequent voiceover narration emphasize perspective, perception and narrative reliability. The final words “You can no longer tell truth from a lie. You see, it’s madness…” are far too on the nose, but it would have played well on an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
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