The Tulsa Race Riots, aka the Bombing Of Black Wall Street, were util woefully recent a relatively unknown event in American history. Television series such as Watchmen and Lovecraft Country did much to call attention to this little known, but it remains a bit of American history not many people are familiar with. Alex Herron’s Don’t Hang Up attempts to plumb the depths of this tragedy as a source of horror, bringing the atrocities of the event into modern times to reveal the depravity of it all.
Summer and her friends have apparently struck gold with a weekend rental house in Tulsa for a friend’s wedding. Her boyfriend Chris can’t make it, but they stay in touch via Facetime. As the weekend progresses, it becomes clear that Summer and her friends don’t quite have the house to themselves and that something is keeping them company.
The tragedy of this film is that there is a compelling story here, but it’s buried under mountains of tropes from found footage style films. Don’t Hang Up is told entirely from the point of view of Summer as she’s facetiming with Chris, so initially he is seeing something she is not. He is, essentially, the audience. Unfortunately, Herron doesn’t do much to avoid the all-too-common pitfalls of found footage. There are several instances in which the camera is set down in such a way that it conveniently captures some spooky phenomenon, or Summer continues to talk to Chris while something horrific is happening. In other words, the question of “why is this person filming right now?” arises far too often in this film. The suspension of disbelief is almost impossible to uphold throughout, and the zippers in the monster costume are glaringly apparent. Aside from Claire McPartland as Summer, the acting is so medium rare that it’s simply impossible to immerse yourself emotionally in this film. That is until the last act when the man Summer is renting the house from stops being an almost cartoonish depiction of a disbelieving adult in a horror film and is revealed to be a relative of a survivor of the race riots and the key to settling the spirits in the house, while also serving as convenient wrap up to the plot. Only at this point does the film reveal a spark of intrigue, but it’s simply frustrating because it reveals what the movie could have been instead of what it was.
Don’t Hang Up is a fine effort and a noble attempt at capturing the horror of one of American history’s most horrifying examples of racial violence, but it falls woefully short of the mark it sets to hit. Mediocre acting, cliched plot points, and found footage tropes weigh this movie down to the point of almost painful dullness.
