By Simon Thompson
Director Haylie Duff’s Killer On The Air is a competently made, yet nothing special thriller that retreads similar thematic ground paved by other suspense classics. While the movie does hold your attention, its not the you-can’t-stop-watching-even if-the-tension-is-too-much-for-you level psychological thriller that I hoped it was.
Killer On The Air follows Sarah (Jessica Morris), a psychologist turned radio host a la Frasier Crane who runs a phone-in relationship counselling show. Sarah’s regularly scheduled programming is upended however, when she receives a mysterious phone call from a man who accuses of her giving his ex-girlfriend advice to leave him – further elaborating that he has taken a hostage that he will kill at the end of Sarah’s late night shift, leaving her in a race against time to trace the caller’s location.
The script by Jeremy M Inman, Damian Romay, and Aaron Strongoni follows in the tradition of thrillers such as Sorry Wrong Number, Play Misty For Me, and Phonebooth in how it uses the plot device of an anonymous phone call to create tension. Unlike those movies however, neither Sarah as a protagonist nor the rest of the supporting cast are particularly interesting, with the arc centred around her strained and unstable home life coming across as trite and cliched.
Jessica Morris gives a decent performance as Sarah, trying her best with the barely serviceable material that she has to work with but unfortunately the script’s shortcomings drag her down. The supporting cast such as Temu Patrick Dempsey cop Officer Sumner (Andrew Fultz) and Sarah’s beleaguered separated husband David (Adam Huss) feel less like fully developed interesting three dimensional characters and more like some terrifying glimpse into a future pre-generative AI program that can create supporting characters in a Lifetime movie.
Ryan Brown’s cinematography is competent enough, employing a style of close ups to build tension, but considering how dark the film is tonally it’s lit far too brightly for a psychological thriller. In contrast when you look at Michael Mann’s masterpiece Manhunter which uses dark tints to evoke a certain mood and how effective that is, and then you compare it to this movie’s unnatural brightness and bland colour palette it feels frustratingly generic.
While the first two acts of this movie feel like a by the numbers run through of thriller cliches, the third act plot twist is laughably bad, with it reaching a nadir that even a Scooby Doo writers room would consider too silly. It made me so angry that I genuinely had to rewind the 5 minute scene where the twist is revealed twice, because I was both baffled and incensed at the same time. Killer On The Air is a flimsily constructed and uninteresting psychological thriller, with poor lighting, a cast of stock tropes instead of characters, and suffers from a complete lack of atmosphere. The worst thing about this movie is that I can’t even recommend it in a so bad it’s good capacity.
Bloody Flicks 