Caller ID: Unknown (2023)

I genuinely laughed out loud at a war film's climax. That's not something I expected to be writing about a movie set against the very real and very grim backdrop of the conflict in Cameroon's anglophone regions, but here we are. The final showdown in Caller ID: Unknown features an explosion that looks like someone found a stock photo of fire and dragged it onto a screenshot of some trees. It's the kind of special effect that makes you wonder if the editing suite was running Windows XP. And in a strange way, that moment crystallises everything about this film: genuine ambition, real dramatic potential, and execution that keeps tripping over its own shoelaces.

The premise isn't bad, actually. Nkwenti survives a rebel attack that wipes out her family and destroys her village in southwest Cameroon. Alone in the bush, she finds a phone on a dead soldier and starts dialling random numbers. She gets through to Essono, a man in northwest Cameroon who is, by any measure, spectacularly unequipped to handle this situation. So far, so intriguing. A war film built around two strangers connected by a phone line across a country tearing itself apart? There's something there. There genuinely is.

The problem is that the film doesn't trust that premise for more than about ten minutes at a stretch.

Because almost immediately, the survival thriller starts melting into a phone romance. And not a tentative, complicated one that acknowledges the extraordinary circumstances, but a full-on giggly, hair-twirling, "your voice makes my heart dance" kind of romance. Nkwenti will be crawling through mud, dodging rebels with guns, and then moments later she's lying on a bed of leaves whispering sweet nothings down a miraculously-charged phone. Her parents are dead. Her village is ash. And she's blushing. The tonal whiplash is violent enough to leave a mark. I kept thinking of the Schindler's List comparison, except at least a conga line would have had some energy to it.

Essono is the other half of this equation, and the film is oddly unbothered by the fact that he has a wife. She exists. She appears briefly. She has, at a rough count, zero lines of any consequence. She's essentially a background character in her own marriage, present just long enough to establish that Essono is technically unavailable before the film cheerfully waves that away. He eventually abandons his job, his home, and his entire life to trek into active rebel territory to find a woman he's spoken to on the phone a handful of times. The script presents this as romantic. I found it baffling.

And then there are the subtitles. I watched this on Amazon Prime, and whoever was responsible for the subtitle track appears to have run out of enthusiasm about halfway through. When characters spoke French or local languages, the subtitles would simply read "speaks foreign language." That's it. That's the translation. Thanks for that. Given that this is a film with multiple languages doing real dramatic work, losing track of what people are actually saying isn't a minor inconvenience, it's a structural problem. I've hit subtitle issues before on these A-Z World Movie Tour watches, but this was a new low.

Here's what I'll say in the film's defence, and I mean this sincerely: Cameroon looks absolutely stunning. The lush jungle, the misty mountain landscapes, the sheer green density of it all. The camera clearly loves the place, and so did I. It's one of those low-budget productions where nature does a lot of heavy lifting, and the scenery genuinely earns its screen time. There's also something in Nkwenti's character that flickers with real resilience and interest, whenever the script remembers she's a trauma survivor rather than a love interest waiting to be rescued.

I've been doing this A-Z World Movie Tour precisely because I want to find films from places that rarely get a look-in on the global stage, and there's something worthwhile in the attempt here. This is Cameroon's first review on Letterboxd that I can find, which means I'm writing about it essentially in a vacuum. That matters. Caller ID: Unknown is clearly a film made with real passion about a real conflict that deserves serious dramatic attention. The Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon is not a subject that gets much coverage in the films I usually watch. I wish this had been the film to do it justice. It isn't, quite. But it's a fascinating, maddening, occasionally accidental artefact of a cinema reaching for something bigger than its resources could support.

One and a half stars: one for the scenery, half for the Photoshop explosion that broke my brain in the best possible way.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2023  | Watched: 2025-06-03

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

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