A short film from 2009, Dialtone tells the story of Greg Pleasant (played by the film’s director, Brian Lohr.)

Greg is an attorney and apparently, a pretty successful one.  He has a nice office in  a nice building in downtown Seattle and his partners all respect him and trust him with the big clients.  The big clients often ask Greg to do things that could be considered unethical and Greg says that he has no problem with it.  When the mayor demands to know if Greg’s Christian faith is going to get in the way of being a cutthroat, amoral attorney, Greg tells a joke about about how, when he was in England, he saw a gravestone that said that a man had been “a lawyer and a Christian.”  “They buried two people in that grave,” Greg’s tour guide said.

Four days after the death of his wife, workaholic Greg is back in the office and saying that he doesn’t need any time off.  He’s back and ready to help the people of Seattle continue to exploit legal loop holes and get out of paying taxes.  However, a mysterious man named Peter (Craig Munson) steps into the office and says that Greg needs to come with him,  Peter explains that he has a phone that can be used to call people in the past.  Greg is skeptical but, after getting an enigmatic phone call, Greg follows Peter to a warehouse.  Peter gives Greg a list of everyone who will die in the next two days and tells Greg to call them.  Greg isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say.  Peter tells him that he’ll have to figure that out on his own.

As I said at the start of this review, Dialtone is a short film.  It clocks in at a little over 45 minutes and the end credits run for several minutes so, in reality, Dialtone is the length of a typical sitcom.  The short-length adds to the film’s dream-like feel.  Since there’s not much time for Greg to have doubts or to argue with Peter, it seems like he manages to go from his office to the warehouse in the blink of an eye.  (And perhaps he did….)  As Greg calls the people who are going to die and encourages them to get both their material and spiritual affairs in order, he has flashback to the accident that cost his wife her life.  The effect is entertainingly surreal.  The film’s story is not always easy to follow.  I assumed that Greg was having a hallucination for the majority of the film but the ending seemed to suggest that everything happened exactly the way that we saw it happen.  The film’s message is clear enough, even if the story is sometimes muddled.

It’s a flawed film.  The acting is frequently amateurish, which is definitely a recurring problem when it comes to faith-based films.  But the weird imagery and the idea of a telephone that can call two days into the past were properly intriguing.  Who would you call if you could call someone two days in the past?  I’d probably call my neighbors and ask them to check if I left behind my favorite gold pen when I last visited.

Finally, as a sign of the times, I thought the film was being ironic by having Peter lead Greg to a landline phone.  But then I realized that this film was made in 2009, back when it wasn’t quite as unusual for people to still have a landline as it is now.  It’s amazing how quickly things change.