The Listener: a stolid single-location drama

• Reviewed from the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.

Steve Buscemi’s fifth directorial feature cannot be accused of false advertising. Titled The Listener, the film is indeed about a listening professional, and gosh, does she do a lot of listening. More to the point, gosh, do we watch her doing a lot of listening – not exactly the most dynamic visual experience. This movie might have worked better as a podcast.

A crisis hotline operator pseudonymously named Beth (a heroically composed Tessa Thompson, the only onscreen actor throughout) works a night shift from the small apartment she shares with a dog. Recently released ex-cons; depressives; self-described “crazy” people; the lonely; the horny; the broken-hearted; even a toxic misogynist who’s really into revenge porn – Beth listens to them all. Sometimes, just to spice up DoP Anka Malatynska’s polished but housebound images – mostly composed of close-ups of Thompson’s placid, occasionally clouded countenance as she reacts with practised, compassionate sangfroid to the buffeting waves of trauma and sadness coming down the line – she’ll pad into the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

It’s fortunate that Buscemi secured an actress as watchable as Thompson for this clearly pandemic-conceived project. But even her radiant warmth, which comes through especially in the creamy calmness of her phone voice, cannot overcome the fundamental inertia of a scenario that is just a person taking a series of unrelated calls from a sometimes distractingly starry voice cast, including Margaret Cho, Alia Shawkat, Logan Marshall-Green and Rebecca Hall. The screenplay, by Alessandro Camon, is not much help: too many of the callers’ crises come in the form of juicily scripted monologues, little potted plays that each spans a spectrum of emotion, the better to allow the voice performers to really perform.

This theatricality is common to many single-location films, and those that are conducted primarily through phone conversations, such as Steven Knight’s Locke (2013) or Gustav Möller’s The Guilty (2018), also sometimes strain credibility with conversations that unfold to unnaturally convenient rhythms. But those films are thrillers, and the calls are threaded together to increase tension and build character across the whole film. Here, it’s not until Hall’s suicidal ex-academic dials in to challenge Beth with an intellectualised, philosophical argument for ending her own life that the film shows much interest in Beth herself. And by then, it’s just too late to invest much dramatic energy in a character whose job it is to undo drama – to soothe the stressed, to comfort the anguished and so to gently coax the bullets out of every Chekhov’s gun.