The Listener review – Tessa Thompson braves the trials of a helpline volunteer

Tessa Thompson brings calm, poise and focus to this low-key actor-project-type drama which is unsure exactly where to place its emotional revelation or how much dramatic emphasis to put on it. But, thanks to Thompson, it is certainly watchable, for all that you expect some off-camera voice to say “scene” at the end of each big speech. It is written by the Italian producer turned screenwriter Alessandro Camon, who co-scripted Oren Moverman’s The Messenger, and Steve Buscemi directs.

Related: Blonde review – Some like it rotten: Monroe biopic is moving, explicit and intensely irritating

Thompson is alone on screen for an hour and a half, playing a helpline volunteer working from home in her LA apartment, setting the alarm so she can get up to start work in the dead of night, listening to people who are anxious, depressed, scared or just bored – and speaking to them with courtesy and professionalism, she is relaxed and friendly (but not too friendly), and where appropriate offering other counselling services. She has a professional name – Beth – for privacy reasons. Like an emergency services phone operator or a phone-in radio show host (though unlike Frasier, she does not say “I’m listening”), she is serially plunged into other people’s micro-dramas, but is also weirdly insulated from them.

Beth takes calls from a troubled ex-con, a man who has just told his wife he doesn’t love her, a woman worried about her daughter with special needs, a teenage girl living on the streets, a raging creepy “incel” who appears to be breathing heavily as Beth speaks to him with kindly gentleness, a bipolar woman, an ex-marine haunted by his Afghanistan experiences, a bitter failed performer, a cop who doesn’t seem especially penitent about a George-Floyd-style situation he was recently in, and finally an angry and unemployed British sociology professor who wants to debate the ethical status of suicide.

Of course, anyone watching this will be – perhaps impatiently – waiting for the big dramatic breakthrough or twist, probably around three-quarters of the way in: the moment when we find out about Beth’s life. Will she perhaps recognise one of the voices … or will one of the callers recognise her? Or would such a coincidence, such an extravagant point of contact, be too much of a stretch and render dull and obsolete the rest of the film? It is a tricky decision, although Beth is never really unsettled by anything.

Related: The Damned Don’t Cry review – mournful portrait of colonial tension

It is therefore a little difficult to read the film’s resistance to dramatic change or progress. It doesn’t give you the big flourish or meltdown you might expect, but this is, after all, surely close to what a helpline volunteer’s day-to-day or night-to-night life is actually like. And though it means the movie chugs along in a single gear, Thompson brings to it a certain subtle mystery. As Buscemi brings the camera into her face for a closeup, we can sense her inaudible monologue running in parallel with the caller ranting or droning and sobbing; her own secret thoughts flavour what is happening on screen. Perhaps she is thinking about a certain call that she is nerving herself up to make the next morning, a call which we see happening, but which hardly supplies anything approaching a happy ending. This is an intriguing, if undeveloped performance piece, elevated by Thompson’s class.

• The Listener screened at the Venice film festival.