A mobster who studied botany and pre-Socratic dialogue. A modern dancer turned veterinarian who isn’t afraid to bite back. A newlywed who wonders whether most lives aren’t lived on a service road running parallel to the one you should be driving down. Also: foot injuries, sexual innuendos, lost keys, and gunshots. In Eliza Barry Callahan’s The House Call, premiering at New York Film Festival next month, Victoria Pedretti stars as a veterinarian called in to treat a mafioso’s colic-ridden horse in the dark of night, only to end up healing more existential maladies of her own.
The film is Callahan and Pedretti’s second collaboration, following The Non-Actor, a quiet interrogation of desire and a subtle bisexual manifesto also starring Maya Hawke, which became Mubi’s most-streamed film of the month when it was released on the platform in August. Both films are dilations of what Barry Callahan calls “pressure points” in her 2024 debut novel, The Hearing Test, an elegant, elliptical “walk around herself” in the wake of a diagnosis of sudden deafness. A single paragraph meditating on one surreal evening in her mother’s life becomes her latest: a near 20-minute absurdist thriller reckoning with lives unlived, terror, desire, and gifts that might actually enclose insults. Callahan is a born-and-bred New Yorker, and The House Call moonlights as a roll call of city-dwelling multi-hyphenates, with a cast including Zack Borzone of YHWH Nailgun in his acting debut, musician Damon McMahon (Amen Dunes), Michael Buscemi, New York Times editor Miya Lee, poet Susan Bruce, and artist Laszlo Horvath. Both films were edited by Daniel Garber, editor of Primetime and How to Blow Up A Pipeline.
In an industry awash in IP, Barry Callahan’s translations of her fiction into film startle and swerve while remaining rooted in pliant hope. Pedretti, who made her Broadway debut in Enemy of the People in 2024, is also known for elevating popular Netflix horror and thriller series with an earnest, quiet gravitas. (She also stars in artist Rachel Rose’s forthcoming Mrs. Dalloway adaptation, The Last Day, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June). In her collaborations with Barry Callahan, she broadens her range, darting across delicate affective terrain with comic verve and winking melancholy. Earlier this month, the three of us met in Brooklyn Heights to talk legibility, love, adaptation, vulnerability, and being mean.
Both of your collaborations are adaptations of brief scenes in Eliza’s novel The Hearing Test. In that novel, the protagonist at one point expresses remorse at not becoming an architect, a regret she shares with her mother. “I had convinced myself that I wanted people to entrust me with their floors, their walls, their ceilings,” she thinks to herself. I thought that line could also describe the process of handing off your fiction to an actor who is going to live in the character, but perhaps add her own interior decor.
Eliza Barry Callahan: When we met for the first time, I immediately felt Victoria’s very specific sensitivity to being in and with the world. I felt a kind of shocking and instant attunement with her—I was genuinely curious to find out how she would interpret the language I’d written down—how she’d expand a frame I’d made for her. I really had no hesitation about the handoff.
Victoria Pedretti: Eliza is very open to people and leaves a large impression. We started working together because we had mutual friends, and I would hear them describe Eliza with the utmost respect and admiration. So it was very easy to trust the process and to fall into her walls and floors.
The House Call and The Non-Actor are connected by Victoria’s performances, as well as by a tonal thread—they share a strangely dichotomous, alluring mood of comic melancholy, sarcastic optimism, and an oddly practical whimsy. Tell me about your conversations around tone, and whether you saw these films as related or distinct.
Barry Callahan: I was treating them as distinct, though I was drawing from my one little well of ideas. In The House Call, I was playing with different genres. The film begins as a gesture toward classic noir-ish thriller, then moves into maybe New Wave walk-and-talk mode, and then into this almost docu-series feel. Victoria was able to subtly make those turns. I’m not sure how she’s so good at adjusting the dial in such surprising and honest ways.
Pedretti: That speaks to Eliza’s understanding that life is full of dichotomies; things aren’t simple. We can have incredibly traumatic experiences, like witnessing a murder or losing our hearing, and that is maybe something we’re never able to process. When we deal with things like grief, it’s strange how our bodies and our minds can step away from dealing with it directly while also being propelled towards realizations seemingly unrelated. I guess I see how that could come across as sinister to some. There are, of course, other connections between the films: in The Non-Actor, my character is based on The Hearing Test’s main character, who is based on Eliza, and in The House Call, my character is based on that character’s mother. Thinking about Eliza’s mother was part of my role in The House Call, and also thinking about my own: my mother was a modern dancer, and this character is a former dancer. There are unintentional elements of both of them in us.
At one point, the novel’s protagonist recalls being told that no two men “have the same capacity to be affected,” a line that reminds me of Victoria’s characters’ receptivity to experience, alongside their capacity to rapidly undergo transformations in the wake of experiences without losing themselves in the process.
Barry Callahan: Victoria is able to perform moments that involve briefly metabolizing the lies her character has told herself, then bouncing right back into a protective opacity. You can see it on her face, that even if she’s going to keep lying to other people, she is no longer lying to herself… maybe!
Pedretti: I feel like that’s what you wrote!
Barry Callahan: Well, maybe so, but I think I’m also learning from your performance, or learning a layer I wasn’t aware of as the writer. It’s eerie to have someone enact your subconscious! Your performance translated something that couldn’t be done in language alone, but is accomplished in gesture, expression, and tone.
A character in The House Call observes that “most lives are lived on a service road running parallel to the life they should be living,” a line that also appears in The Hearing Test. Both films follow women who at first appear to be mourning lives unlived. Forced onto the service road by a roadblock, they end up enjoying the view from the shoulder. There’s a conviction across these films that some revelations can only be accessed if we’re unafraid of being thrown off course.
Pedretti: To me, The House Call is about reckoning with what you feel like you should want versus what actually is fulfilling. This character has told herself that she’s this great failure because she didn’t become a dancer. I know so many people who aspire towards extremely physical professions, whether it’s sports or dance, who get injured at a point they’ve worked their whole lives to reach. It’s really hard to imagine and believe that life after this thing is ripped from you could actually be empowering at all. If my character had remained a dancer, she would have continued to work her body to the bone. Now she has an awesome job that she really loves, and maybe she’ll even have a baby girl someday.
Barry Callahan: I am undeniably concerned with the service road. The indirect path, the path of avoidance that we either create for ourselves or that we’re sent down by circumstance or both. How one does or doesn’t submit to the side road. How one’s wish can change, and how disorienting that can be.
It’s almost about coming to see the service road as a silver lining, a route that allows you to stop staring at the map so closely, and look around you, or into yourself.
Barry Callahan: I never went to film school, but from what I’ve heard, the big question one is expected to ask oneself while screenwriting is: What are your character’s wants? I realized that I’m interested in characters who don’t know what they want, but who do want, really intensely. Often in films, we’re seeing characters who want something, go for it, and then are thwarted. I’m driving towards desire, but the thwarting is internal.
That reminds me of the way your novel closes, when she realizes she’s actually taken “a long walk around herself” over the course of this hearing loss, after at first feeling like the syndrome, and the resulting increasing volume of her interior thoughts, made her nearer to herself.
Barry Callahan: The closeness to herself at the start of the novel, I think, implies a greater distance from others. She’s closer to herself because so much is tuned out involuntarily. As a result she can hear herself better, and when she begins to hear herself better, she understands how to connect with others more deeply than before. But that long walk around herself, the service road, is a prerequisite to understanding that.
In The House Call, the protagonist approaches herself by lying, or fantasizing, about what her life could be in the company of strangers—she tells a group that she is a “site-specific performance artist,” so what I want to ask you two is: Isn’t adulthood just a series of site-specific performance pieces?
Barry Callahan: Where does the rehearsal end and the performance begin!
Pedretti: And we can change our roles, and our motivations. We can have wanted something, and then we can want something different. There can be pain in that, that goes along with the joy of discovery of something new. It’s a process of becoming, and it never ends. We are continuously changing beings. So many people want to define themselves one way. By the end of both of these films, my character is a different person than they were at the beginning. You would describe them using different descriptions. And I kind of think any description at any point is limiting.
You’re making an incredibly compelling case for adaptation as a form of translation. There are some words that simply don’t exist in another language, which means the word chosen by the translator will both be insufficient and expand the sentence’s original meaning, just as an actor’s gestures and expressions do with the written word. Eliza, did adapting prose into a script feel like a sort of translation within one language?
Barry Callahan: The Non-Actor, The House Call, and the feature I’m now writing are all rooted in the novel in some way. I’ve compared the adaptation process to visiting a house I once lived in. It involves inhabiting this familiar space, but you get to have a layer of completely new interaction with the material. The pleasure of filmmaking is that you also get to hand many sets of little keys over and relinquish a lot of control—there’s submission to chance and to other people’s process and influence, which is horrifying and delightful.
These films admit desire is messy. They not only find compassion for the mess, but also a potent eroticism in a sort of grimy confusion. The Non-Actor’s protagonist seems to want to make a mess, interpersonally, to find out more about herself.
Barry Callahan: I was interested in writing something that steps beyond sexuality, and reaches some fundamental desire. I wonder whether sexuality is a kind of gas station on the way to desire at large. What brings them to the point of this shared physical experience are their deep independent fantasies. It doesn’t really have to do with the man they have both loved, or either woman, or anything but the self really.
The narrator of The Hearing Test thinks, upon receiving a diagnosis of Sudden Deafness, that “the term sounded so severe that it verged on comedic for the wingspan of one moment.” Tell me about translating time: How does a moment’s wingspan stretch and shrink in the transition from page to screen?
Barry Callahan: Both of the shorts are based on little punctures in the book, but they become these unraveled roads I had originally just passed the signposts of. We turned one page into an 18-minute film and a single paragraph into a 20-minute film. I was able to change the aperture of specific moments in the novel: make it wider, or more well-lit than I could when I was continuing on my merry way in the book. I looked for pressure points in the text that could be opened up so I could try to get closer to whatever I was gesturing at. You can’t use words in the same way, and time is of course dilated differently.
The Hearing Test’s narrator finds “clarity in misinterpretation.” She believes “our misinterpretations are perhaps the most individual and specific things we have.” Those lines felt like they might apply to the process of inhabiting a character someone else wrote, or watching someone act out your writing. Did y’all run into any “clarifying misinterpretations” on set?
Barry Callahan: Watching Victoria act, there were moments—I wouldn’t call them misinterpretations—but interpretations that I’d not imagined that managed to get at some honesty or truth inside the text that I actually could not get to with just language. Thank you, Victoria!
Pedretti: To me, acting is translation. Language is limited; there’s so much more to how we communicate. That’s part of why I find this work fascinating, what makes me find every conversation fascinating. I’m amazed by how often we’re all misinterpreted. Actually, because of that, I’ve been asking people a lot more questions lately. I think it’s a more vulnerable approach to living.
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