It’s often been said that all acting is reacting, and Tessa Thompson makes an excellent case for that throughout The Listener. The film follows Thompson’s character, Beth, one night as she volunteers for a crisis helpline, listening to everyone from a teenage runaway in an abusive relationship to a veteran experiencing PTSD to a struggling actress lamenting all the fake people in her life.

Tessa Thompson Gives an Amazing Performance in ‘The Listener’

Image via Tribeca

The Listener simply wouldn’t work without Thompson’s performance, as the entire film hinges on it. In fact, she’s the only person we ever actually see. Though there are many other characters, we experience them as Beth does: just by hearing their voices. She and the film handle each of these people with compassion, discovering humanity and vulnerability even in those that you are meant to find ethically questionable. It doesn’t give you any easy answers, turning away from black and white to sit firmly in the gray area. It also deals with difficult topics like suicide, depression, racism, abuse, and more with a careful hand. It is a melodrama, but it never feels exploitative, nor does it drift into after-school special territory.
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It’d be easy for Beth to feel like a passive character as, for the majority of the film, she’s not directly saying anything about herself. But Thompson makes her come alive even in the quieter moments. She’s an enigma, and that’s the point. “It’s not about me. I’m here to listen” feels like the film’s thesis statement. Still, it ultimately is a film about her, and as an audience, we can’t help wanting to get close to her. Thompson handles that tightrope act well, keeping us engaged while maintaining a sense of mystery and necessary stoicism. It feels like if we read between the lines, we can start piecing together the kind of person she is outside of this. And though she’s straightforward, there’s a warmth that makes us want to trust her. It helps us understand why people share what they do with a stranger like her.

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It’s an impressively restrained performance, with her microexpressions saying it all. That’s her job, after all, to remain calm and as non-judgmental as she can. We get to see emotion, but mostly, we see her trying to hold it back. I actually wonder if choosing following this character a few months ago — before she’s as practiced and used to everything — could have been even more compelling, in a way. If her facade cracked just a bit more often, a bit more extremely, there may have been something more to carry the film through the lulls.

‘The Listener’s Premise Makes for Difficult Pacing

Image via Tribeca

Despite only being an hour and a half, The Listener can be somewhat of an exhausting experience, though that’s not always a bad thing. Rather, it has a somewhat immersive effect, showing us the reality of what this volunteer position entails. We are right there alongside Beth as she listens to all of these people’s stories. Many of them are heartbreaking, and it’s easy to see how absorbing that amount of grief and trauma can take a toll. Others can even feel a bit tedious with people grasping at things to say toward the end of the call because they don’t want to be alone. Others, though, are downright terrifying. It’s hard not to feel scared for Beth when she talks to an aggressive incel or sheriff recounting a struggle with how to handle police brutality despite the film taking place in the safety of her property the entire time.

The film very much feels like a product of COVID due to the single location, and the pandemic seeps into other aspects of the film as well. It’s referenced several times by the callers and touches on it in one of the most honest, natural, and effective ways I’ve ever seen in media. It’s fascinating — and tragic — learning how it affected a man just out of prison, as well as a woman living in a houseless encampment. It’s not the movie’s focus, and that’s to its benefit. It’s touched on just enough to be effective and ground the film in a specific moment in time.

Director Steve Buscemi, to his credit, doesn’t make the film feel stagnant or any more suffocating than intended despite its one location. Beth often paces around her home or finds things to do with her hands — play with a stress ball or draw a symbol of who she’s talking to — but while the lack of visual stimulation does allow us to focus on Thompson’s performance and adds an element of reason, it can make the pacing feel a little slow at times.

Things pick up in the third act when we finally get to know Beth on a more intimate level, with one of her callers requesting her story. And while the information we get does give her new depth and dimension that helps us contextualize how she interacted with the callers that came before, I almost wish we got to dive in more deeply. The movie feels like a creative kind of character study, but even when we do get insight into Beth’s past, she keeps it relatively vague. Because we don’t get to hear or see a lot of the specifics, one can’t help but wonder if perhaps the feature could have been just as effective as a short film.

That last, long call when Beth gets more personal is one of the high points of the movie, but it does slip when it starts getting a bit abstract and philosophical, teetering on feeling like a plot device to get a message across rather than a character-driven piece. It’s cleverly integrated, as the person on the other end of the line is a sociologist, but there are a lot of heavy, heady points brought up and argued in quick succession about religion, happiness, and suffering.

There’s a lot to like about The Listener, with Thompson’s performance easily being the highlight. It’s a simple yet powerful story of finding connection and hope through the dark times. Though the pacing can be a bit slow at times, and the third act suffers from feeling a bit esoteric, the grounded conversations that make up the first hour make an ultimately compelling film with an important message.

Grade: B

The Listener had its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival.