Listen Carefully movie
Link to watch the movie from here
A bank manager and new father with a dark secret sees his baby daughter kidnapped when a mystery man calls him to get him to jump through hoops to get his child back safely.
Written and directed by Ryan Barton-Grimley, the story here feels familiar with a few twists here and there, but overall, an overwhelming feeling that one has seen this before, knows the story, knows the style, and can predict some of what is about to happen permeates the film. The story is not bad, and it’s not badly written. There is something here, but for those who watch a ton of movies, it will feel like they’ve seen it before. It’s not bad, it’s not boring, but also not great or exciting. The writing works and so the direction, it’s simply not something that is going to hit with everyone.
The cast here is small, and the lead is writer-director Barton-Grimley, something that may have been a money saving move or something more planned for the story itself. Here, it mostly works, meaning that the performance works, but see previous paragraph. The rest of the cast gets very little screen time, but the one with the least screen time makes a great impression as the creepy voice on the baby monitor. Ari Schneider truly makes the most of being a creep only heard and not seen. His work here shows that he understood the material and the assignment, elevating the film from dark and somewhat creepy to actually chilling in a few sequences.
Working with the story and the cast is the cinematography, by Sean Ayers and additional cinematography by Barton-Grimley, which gives the film its look and mood that are dark and gritty, for lack of a better word, as this is one of those films that looks like some of the colors were sucked out of it. Here, this is a good thing, and it works for the story, the film, and the characters. The work creates good looking images with an undertone of darkness which is just right here.
This work is paired with the editing by Matt Latham, editing that makes the most of the images, the situations, and the creep factor, elevating the later by letting images stay on screen just long enough at times to make one wonder what they just saw or heard even. The editing here is doing the story a ton of favors, moving it forward when it seems to get a little stuck.
As it is Listen Carefully has some good ideas, some good moments, and a good pace, but it’s missing something while feeling too familiar to this constant watcher. There is something here, something many will adore, but for this viewer, things were on the too predictable side of film life.
