LIFELINE (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Lifeline, Dark Sky Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2025

Once it's revealed, the central gimmick of Lifeline holds nothing but promise. Brady Morell and Brian Price's screenplay takes its time to get there, of course, and doesn't do much with the conceit, unfortunately. Without saying too much too early about the direction this story takes, here's a question: If you could tell your past self only a few things about life, what would you say?

That is the question Steven Thomas (Josh Stewart) eventually must answer in director Feras Alfuqaha's movie, and the neat thing about this mostly single-location tale is that the concept doesn't seem to be metaphorical. No, Steven can tell his younger self something or some things, and under the circumstances, he might need to if he wants his own life to carry on as it is.

This is, then, kind of a thriller, although the movie is surprisingly more grounded and introspective than one might think, given its race-against-the-clock premise and the likelihood of some supernatural or metaphysical or other otherworldly event happening within it. We just follow an ordinary guy, working the late shift at a suicide-prevention hotline in California on New Year's Eve, as he tries to save lives, to figure out what he's going to do with his own, and to talk to himself as a college-aged young man who is thinking that life might not be worth living.

Steven does seem to have it together in his older form, which feels like some reassurance once he does piece together why one voice on the other end of a phone call shares so much in common with him. His wife Vivian (Carlene Amoia) is kind and supportive, and the two have a teenage son (played by August Maturo) who's about to have a first date with his first girlfriend at a party with all his friends. The gig at the hotline is volunteer work, which Steven does at least once a year, and while his regular job is never entirely clear, he's writing a memoir that his wife believes is worth passing on to a published author she knows.

A lot of the early story, after meeting Steven and his family, shows him sitting at his desk in the call center, answering the phone as lonely and struggling and hurt people reach out for a sympathetic voice in the darkness of their lives. Steven knows what to say to these people, and he also knows when and how to get the police involved, such as when a woman hints that her husband is abusive but that she's too scared of him to directly ask for help. Stewart's performance in the role is maybe a little too aloof at times, which actually might make some sense once the whole puzzle of the script is pieced together, but when his Steven talks to these people, that sense of compassion and understanding comes through as Alfuqaha's camera stays locked on him.

Some strange or coincidental things happen. Steven gets a call from that author just as he decides to look up the guy's credentials online. There's an earthquake that nobody else seems to notice. Considering that a holiday must be a busy time for such an operation, there's only one other person in the office, and she's gone soon after Steven starts his shift.

The weirdest thing, obviously, is when he gets a call from a young man named Steven (Judah Lewis), who tells the older Steven that his last name is also Thomas. This Steven attends the same university the older Steven went to, and the younger guy is studying what the older one's degree is in. The younger Steven has gone to a local motel with a pistol, and he tells the older Steven that he plans to kill himself in a few hours at midnight.

This is too good a premise to dismiss, simply because it raises so many questions of possible logical gaps or potential contradictions. It's also too compelling a setup to waste, and that's where the disappointment arises. Morell and Price simply don't let the two Stevens talk to each other enough for the premise to pay off in a compelling way.

Instead, we learn a lot about the older Steven's own past by way of assorted flashbacks—mainly his relationship with his abusive father (played by Craig Stark), who destroyed his own family over the course of decades until only Steven remained. We also learn a bit about the early stages of Steven's relationship with Vivian (played by Tu Muorrow as a young woman), but there's another catch here that suggests the younger Steven on the other end of the line might be affecting the present-day one. When the older Steven looks up his wife on the internet, he can only find her under her maiden name.

To be sure, Lifeline answers all of these riddles in due time. That's to say it does so at the very end of the story—after suggesting more promising ideas, circling around the mystery so often that the screenplay sometimes seems to forget to advance the plot or characters, and teasing us with the philosophical, psychological, and emotional conundrum of what an older person might say to one's younger self. The solution here does make some sense, but in a way that goes beyond tragedy, it also and hopelessly doesn't matter.

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