Calls: Is Apple TV Plus’ new immersive audio-visual series the future of entertainment?

In a move that will make audience’s heads spin, Apple TV Plus has released a new series from director, creator and writer Fede Álvarez called Calls, an immersive experience that could herald a new era of entertainment in future.

Over the past year or so, people across the globe have been relying on entertainment to escape from the difficulties and struggles of everyday life during the pandemic. For some, this meant watching the entire Marvel catalogue from start to finish. To others, it meant eagerly anticipating The Great British Bake Off. No matter your preference, one thing is for sure – TV and film have been a much-needed source of escapism at a time when many of us need it most.

From the offset, Calls appears to take inspiration from other TV series that have come before it, Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone in particular. Set against the backdrop of an apocalyptic event, the nine-episode drama features phone calls between different sets of characters, whose conversations are shown on screen in the form of captions and mesmerising graphics, with no faces in sight.

However, once you start watching the first episode – each episode is around 15 to 20 minutes long – it quickly becomes apparent that this show is something entirely new, an astonishing achievement in an age where the TV market is saturated with multiple seasons of the same shows, reboots, reruns and recycled ideas.

During a recent Zoom conversation with Metro.co.uk, Evil Dead director Fede acknowledged that Calls ‘is definitely standing on the shoulders of giants’, citing Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone as examples.

However, he believes Calls, which is based on the French series of the same name created by Timothée Hochet, is created in a way ‘that has never been done before’.

‘I think the bar for me was that the idea needed to be good enough to make a feature film. Every idea for every one of the episodes needed to be something that I thought this could be… it happened with the past version of the shows, usually you watch a good Black Mirror episode and you think, this could be a movie. I think the same here. That was the standard that we had, the bar we had for every one of the episodes,’ Fede said.

‘But yeah, I think the concept of just having you hooked to these visuals in a way that had never been done before… that was what drew me at least, and I knew it was going to be completely different from all the other shows that had some similarities.’

Fede outlined that the look of the graphics was majorly inspired by abstract art, due to the way in which the visuals can be interpreted by viewers in a way that is entirely singular to them.

‘I think we drew more from abstract art than anything else because abstract art always plays with the idea of like you see a dot on the screen and that’s supposed to be a bird – there’s a lot of that in the show,’ he explained.

‘You see shapes that are a Rorschach test – they’re definitely not even close to what you think you’re seeing. But the story’s taking you to imagine those elements. So that’s something that I think was super unique about it and it’s so refreshing to be able to work on something that looks like nothing else.’

Every detail of the visuals that accompany the phone calls shared between stars including Lily Collins, Pedro Pascal and Nick Jonas are key to the narrative, and enabled the creators of Calls to ‘go back to the basics of storytelling’, Fede said, as they didn’t have to ‘depend on the big scope or the big spectacle of movie making’.

Certain parts of the series have clearly been created in a way that’s supposed to emulate classic camera work, such as the zooming in on a specific word that in a typical TV show would be replicated with a close-up of an actor’s face.

‘The fact that we had to come up with the full visual language for it that had not been done before that we had to create from scratch, it was fascinating and it was a chance to take everything I learned making movies, and what I know a close-up or an extreme close-up in someone’s eye, or a low camera angle creeping through a hallway creates, and translate that into graphics that hopefully creates the same emotion,’ Fede said.

The creator added that there’s also a strong ‘power of colours’, as various hues ‘will create certain anticipations of an idea or something that is about to happen’, stating that ‘to marry image with abstract graphics was a fascinating experience’.

While there was a script for the nine chronological episodes, Fede allowed the actors to have freedom when acting out their scenes over the phone, ad libbing lines in order to generate authentic and realistic conversations.

So could series like Calls – which grip viewers so instantly that they can’t tear their eyes away from the screen – become more commonplace, as people across the world seek out more unique forms of entertainment?

While Fede said that he hopes so, he added that he doesn’t think ‘we need to do it all the time with ‘a thousand shows like this one’.

‘That’s what I like about it – there’s nothing like it, there’s no billion shows like this right now. I think it’s good that people use their imagination more and dare to do that. I think compared with the past, as times go by I think we use less of our imagination,’ he said.

‘Hollywood and television have enabled you to create worlds you don’t have to imagine anymore – the world is fully rendered on the screen for you.

‘I think the imagination is always more powerful because whatever you imagine is always going to be better. It’s going to be the best image, the scariest place or the most beautiful person. Like whatever you want to imagine, it’s always going to be really hard to top.’

Comparing Calls to old-fashioned radio shows, he added: ‘So to invite people to use their imagine again in this time I think is a beautiful thing.’

All nine episodes of Calls are available to watch on Apple TV+.

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