Entertainment
Disturbing, R-Rated 80s Thriller Is An Unwanted Guest That Will Drive You Insane
By Robert Scucci
| Published
You know what I like about older psychological thrillers? They don’t rely on an excessive amount of camera tricks to make you question the validity of a character’s reality. In films like 1987’s The Caller, there are no vivid hallucinations, and you’re seeing everything as clear as day. You’re left in the dark about a character’s origins and motives, but that’s exactly what makes it such a fun film.
A woman, simply known as The Girl (Madolyn Smith Osborne), lives alone in a remote cabin. A man, simply known as The Caller (Malcolm McDowell), shows up unannounced, asking to use her phone. The Girl is suspicious of The Caller, but The Caller’s presence and countenance suggest that he has every right to be suspicious of her. It’s such a painfully simple premise, but by the time you get to the third act, you’ll have no idea what’s going on, and in the best kind of way.
A Psychological Thriller That Truly Thrives On Mind Games
When The Caller introduces its only two characters, it lets the viewer know, in no uncertain terms, that they’re about to get epically screwed with. The Girl arrives home after running errands in town and has set the table for two. As far as you can tell, she lives alone. The Caller shows up, explains that his car has a flat tire, and asks if he can use her phone.
Immediately, she’s suspicious. She starts picking apart his story about his car’s make and model. He always has a quick answer, but sometimes those answers contradict what The Girl has actually seen and knows to be true. Other times, she starts talking about her own living situation in ways that make The Caller suspicious that she’s up to no good.
Their stories constantly change. The Girl suggests that she caused The Caller’s car trouble so he’d have no choice but to knock on her door, where she’d invite him in and kill him. The Caller suggests that he’s a police officer who was summoned to her place under the assumption that she murdered her entire family. Both characters start clocking each other for plot holes in their stories. They keep score, and make a game of it.
Each encounter that The Girl has with The Caller gets increasingly unhinged, suggesting they’ve been playing this game of cat and mouse for quite some time, and could quite possibly be trapped in a “choose-your-own-ending” kind of time loop. The evening continues to escalate, and you don’t know who you should be rooting for. The woman being relentlessly stalked by her unwanted guest? Or the hard-working police officer being manipulated by a family-annihilating woman in the middle of a psychotic episode?
More Twists Than Auntie Anne’s!
The mind games played in The Caller are brilliant in their simplicity. It’s a simple premise that slowly heats up until it reaches its boiling point. Both characters are clearly up to something. Their interactions are mostly adversarial, but sometimes surprisingly disarming. One second they’re trying to help each other along in good faith, and the very next moment they’re at each other’s throats, absolutely sure they’re going to get killed the second they let their guard down.
The grounded production makes the mystery all the more enthralling because the only mind games happening are between the characters, not tricks being forced onto the viewer to influence their interpretation either way. They’re saving the real bomb drop for the third-act reveal, which I never would have anticipated in my wildest dreams. I live for these kinds of movies, and what plays out on screen is nowhere near what I was expecting.
I normally pride myself on being able to sniff twist endings out from a mile away, but everything happens so suddenly in The Caller that I never saw it coming. It’s the kind of film you immediately want to watch a second time because you just know they were dropping clues left and right. But since you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t think to clock them until it’s already too late.
The Caller is simple, brooding, and beyond fun if you’re tired of the same old thriller slop Netflix has been putting out lately. Tropes are subverted, motives are always floating around in muddy waters, and you truly don’t know who you’re rooting for because both characters are so manipulative. To solve the mystery that The Caller offers, you can stream it free on Tubi as of this writing.
Entertainment
New report: X remains the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ users
Elon Musk’s X is still the most unsafe social media platform for LGBTQ+ users, according to a new report by GLAAD.
The organization’s annual Social Media Safety Index (SMSI) and its “platform scorecards” grade social media sites on LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression. GLAAD assessed external-facing policies on diversity programs, content moderation, user suppression, and enforcement mechanisms, among other metrics, for six major companies: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, and TikTok.
X scored just 29 points out of a possible 100. No platform has ever scored above a 67.
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While X may have received the worst marks of the bunch, none of the platforms analyzed by the organization got passing grades. Many, in fact, hit historic lows. GLAAD found that all platforms were “rife with anti-LGBTQ hate, harassment, and disinformation,” and noted nationwide rollbacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.
The report specifically calls out Meta and YouTube’s updated LGBTQ policies, including Meta’s overhaul of its Hateful Conduct policy. YouTube’s score fell 11 points, the most severe drop, compared to the 2025 analysis. TikTok was the only platform whose score did not decrease over the last year, although it still only earned a score of 56 out of 100.
GLAAD began issuing platform scorecards in 2021. Over the last five years, X has consistently earned some of the lowest scores among competitor platforms — X came out on top of TikTok in the organization’s 2022 report. Scores are based on corporate transparency metrics established by global digital human rights organization Ranking Digital Rights and 14 LGBTQ-specific online indicators, GLAAD explained.
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis wrote:
“Leading social media companies today do not meet basic best practices in content moderation, transparency, data privacy, and workforce diversity — and continuously refuse to meaningfully prioritize the safety, privacy, and expression of LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities. Advertisers should question commitments to LGBTQ safety and the disregard for the safety of LGBTQ users as they plan which platforms to continue to support.
To LGBTQ creators, advocates, and organizations targeted on and by these platforms: these companies need to hear from you. The threats in your DMs, the disinformation fueling anti-LGBTQ legislation, and the bullying that leads to real-world violence are not just ‘part of the job.’ They are systemic failures that tech leaders have the tools to fix, yet they choose to profit from them instead.”
Entertainment
AirPods with cameras reportedly in final testing at Apple
Apple might expand its AI wearable efforts into the world of AirPods.
Bloomberg reported today that Apple is in the final stages of testing a new AirPods model that would feature small cameras in each earbud. They would have longer stems than the AirPods you’re used to, but would otherwise look very similar, says Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
According to his latest report, the device has “entered a phase where prototypes feature a near-final design and capabilities” after years of development internally, but we don’t have a firm release date yet. It’s also possible that these prototype AirPods never make it to market.
In case you’re worried about being surreptitiously recorded by any random person with AirPods you see on the street, these cameras would not be used for any kind of photo or video capture. Instead, Gurman says they would be low-resolution modules used to see the environment for the purpose of interacting with an AI assistant.
We first heard about AirPods with cameras back in 2024, when the reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo described AirPods with built-in infrared cameras. At the time, he said these modules would be similar to FaceID cameras and power new spatial audio experiences. More recently, Gurman reported on camera-equipped AirPods this January, saying the focus would be on powering AI features.
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Gurman says the AirPods will apparently include a little LED indicator light that turns on when the cameras are working their magic, but without seeing the earbuds in action, we don’t know how visible that will be to anyone else yet.
While Apple has a strong track record with privacy, there are obvious privacy concerns with putting cameras (no matter how low resolution) in a pair of earbuds. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses have enabled a lot of bad behavior, for instance.
All of this begs the question: Would you wear earbuds with a built-in camera?
As someone who vividly remembers the very negative public response to Google Glass, I do wonder if the populace will feel differently this time around.
Big Tech companies clearly think there will be demand for this sort of device. OpenAI is working on an AI wearable with the famed designer Jony Ive, and Motorola released a concept AI pendant at CES 2026. Apple is also rumored to be working on a wearable AI pin, while Meta and Google have invested in developing smart glasses with cameras.
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Entertainment
Bumble is officially killing the swipe
When Bumble posted a cryptic image on Instagram telling the swipe that “it’s over,” people questioned whether the dating app was really getting rid of swiping. Today, its founder and CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, confirmed that it is.
On “The Axios Show,” Wolfe Herd said, “We are going to be saying goodbye to the swipe and hello to something that I believe is revolutionary for the category.”
The change in the matching mechanism will hit certain markets starting in the fourth quarter of 2026.
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What will replace the swipe? Wolfe Herd didn’t say exactly, but it likely has to do with the new AI-driven matchmaking experience, Dates. Wolfe Herd has also mentioned on multiple earnings calls that Bumble is revamping the app’s backend as well.
“We are evolving into our next chapter,” Wolfe Herd told Axios’s Sara Fischer, which is similar to what a Bumble spokesperson told Mashable yesterday when asked about the Instagram post.
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The full episode doesn’t appear to be live yet, but from Axios’s own coverage, Wolfe Herd also said that the app will not “force one gender over another to do something first,” yet the app will keep “the essence of what was always meant to be women making the first move.”
Bumble has already begun moving away from its “women making the first move” ethos that it held since its inception in 2014.
In 2024, the app launched “Opening Moves” to let men message women first in heterosexual matches. Then-CEO Lidiane Jones said the move was at least partly due to dating app fatigue. Wolfe Herd soon returned as Bumble’s CEO in early 2025, and in February 2026, the app removed the option in Mexico and Australia.
Swiping has been integral to Bumble’s user experience since its launch, two years after Tinder (which Wolfe Herd also cofounded) popularized the “hot or not” swipe model. But given that Bumble’s revenue and paying users are down year over year, it seems the company wants to try something new to regain those users.
Tinder, too, has seen financial dips recently, and it’s also made some changes.
In March, Tinder released a suite of new features, including an AI matchmaker, Chemistry. Hinge, meanwhile, doesn’t have swiping and keeps growing financially, suggesting that dating app users may be tired of rejecting someone with their thumb.
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