Film Review: The Schizophrenic ‘Listen Carefully’

Ryan Barton-Grimley’s Listen Carefully is intended to draw its tension from a familiar scenario: A man’s baby girl is kidnapped and held for ransom, and he must pay $250,000 for her safe return. The mixed-bag plot execution makes at all rather confusing, however.

Listen Carefully

Busy writer/director Barton-Grimley also stars as Andy McNeary, an assistant bank manager who’s exhausted by his work and the pressure of being a new parent. He is also prone to nodding off and experiencing recurring bizarre dreams (including one involving black-clad figures wearing surreal baby masks — Freud, anyone?).

At work, he has just snapped out of one of them when his boss (Patrick Pankhurst) approaches. Andy has been instructed to work with a cyber firm that is investigating the source of fraudulent withdrawals from the bank, and his boss is counting on him. What the boss doesn’t know is that Andy’s hands are certainly not clean either.

Not Carefully Enough

He goes home to his wife, Allie (Simone Barton-Grimley), and infant daughter Abby. Allie has been waiting for him so she can go out for a night with the girls, a break she desperately needs. After looking in on his daughter, he opens her bedroom window(!), goes to the living room with the baby monitor…and falls asleep. When he suddenly awakens with a start, there’s no sound from the monitor, and he rushes to Abby’s room, only to find an empty crib.

The monitor crackles back to life, and a mysterious voice grimly informs him that Abby has been taken, and demands the aforementioned ransom for her safe return. Using a handy universal passcard he’d stolen from the bank, Andy drives from ATM to ATM, withdrawing the maximum from each until he has accumulated the $250,000.

Stylistically, the film is all over the place. In the opening scenes, the dialogue and acting quality are straight out of a 1980s direct-to-video epic. For instance, when the janitor’s cart is left in front of the elevator at work, Andy calls out for him to move it out of the way. When he gets no response, he moves it himself, revealing plenty of space that he could have walked around at any time. He and his wife don’t seem to be too enamored of each other either, as demonstrated by extended shots of Annie staring at Andy angrily. It’s pretty amusing.

Genre Mashup

When he hits the streets to get the cash, Listen Carefully becomes a mashup of genres. Gritty street scenes collide with hallucinations, which in turn collide with Andy’s pesky dreams. It’s occasionally interrupted by a friendly police officer (Ari Schneider) who doesn’t seem concerned at all by the nefarious deeds that Andy may be committing. He just wants to know where Andy got that damn baby monitor.

Listen Carefully’s technical specs are decent. Cinematographer Sean Ayers effectively captures the dimly lit streets that Andy is creeping through, while Audrey Haworth’s production design practically pushes the film into Eraserhead territory. The McNearys are really not having any fun at all.

By the time the film reaches a conclusion, after much reality/fantasy (including the March of the Baby Monitors), it’s pretty perplexing. Some viewers may consider it to be an achievement of style over substance, while others will scratch their heads in disbelief.

Listen Carefully is available on VOD December 16.

Feature photo: Ryan Barton-Grimley (RBG Films LLC).