The Listener

One-actor movies "Buried" & "Locke" were surprisingly good, but "The Listener" is more the art-house bore many would expect such films to be. Samaritans-style helpline worker Tessa Thompson does a night-shift at home taking random, unrelated calls (from various voices inc Rebecca Hall) whose tones range from disturbing to sad to quirky. It'll shine on Thompson's CV (especially as she is great) and Steve Buscemi directs his first film since 2007 with intimate warmth, but Alessandro Camon's plotless character-study screenplay is too self-indulgently pretentious to make it entertaining. Props indeed to helpline workers... but this one's still a dull movie. Flush it.

To hear the stories of the people calling, it's sad and scary. This is a non judgmental line and it was like a confessional. But the difference is that someone wasn't saying they sinned against God but a way to deal with the thoughts that keep them up at night. I wouldn't just watch this but it's a good movie to listen to while doing other stuff. I didn't think it was boring...and perhaps that's because I experienced some traumatic experiences in my life. I wonder where on Earth some of these ideas came from when making this movie. Did the writer or writers each share a wild story of sadness, sin or fear?

Something has gone wrong with our circuitry, circuitry born from experience, life, family, and burnt out from everything since. We are left with the pieces, trying to make sense of our lives or what's left of it, and the past doesn't leave us alone. We are rejected and left with a want for the future, but the future remains out of reach, shielded by darkness, and only the unknown greets us as loneliness takes us by the hand. We need to know that we are not alone, so we search, we hope to find one voice to hear us, hear the stories that we are forced to live, trying to find the way out. But what if there is no way out except for one door that hypothetically we could enter, leaving everything behind? Would we be missed, but should we even think like that? At least, she hears us, and maybe, just maybe, through her voice, her emotion, we find what we desperately seek, a connection, a reminder that no, we are not lost. We are just human.

This movie was fantastic. The acting was outstanding. As someone who has heard a lot of people's difficult stories, and who has lived through a lot of my own, including the suicide of someone close to me, the movie was difficult to watch at times, but spoke so much truth about both the difficulty and the importance of listening to people's experiences. It told the truth about the difficulty of life, about the value of people, about the importance of our experiences, about the value of life and of not ending it. It was so well done. A movie that encourages us to support each other, to do the hard things, to continue to live, is so worth watching.

So saw this on amazon prime since it had a few stars I thought why not. It is extremely boring and nothing happens. It was 14 minutes into the movie and I thought okay any second now. Then I began to fast forward. I got to like 60 minutes and nothing happened I just took it off. What is the purpose of this movie.the synopsis looked promising but I was waiting for what it described to happen. I didn't waste my time finishing it and will check Wikipedia to see if the plot was put there. I'm not sure where the 5 start from imdb came from but it is extremely misleading. I should have came on here and realize it only got 8 reviews before wasting my time.