When troubled divorcee Mary Kee sets up home in her new apartment,and trying to fend off her bitter abusive husband,she stumbles across an old rotary telephone which she quickly falls in love with. Struck by its antique charm, she gives it a place of pride in her home. Before long, Mary begins to receive strange phone calls from a mysterious, unknown caller. Over time, she discovers that the caller is a woman named Rose, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship. However, when Rose claims to be calling from the past in 1979, and proves it by leaving Mary a rose painted in the pantry,Mary begins to question her new friend's motives.Mary learns more about the woman from the handyman George who has been there since 1979.Mary learns Rose had an abusive husband too and apparently killed herself,but Rose picks up on Mary's anger at her ex-husband and kills her abusive husband instead and bricks him up in the pantry which Mary discovers when she finds her pantry newly bricked up the next day.
Mary has a new boyfriend,a teacher named John whose parents run an Italian restaurant and he knows something about science and time,but wonders if her abusive ex-husband isn't just playing mind games with her,particularly when John later has to run him out of the apartment.
As Rose's phone calls become ever more disturbing, Mary's sense of terror escalates. Feeling haunted in her own home, she cuts all contact with Rose. Enraged by Mary's absence,Rose says she's figured out who the "tattletale" is,and a little while later George is no longer alive and a young mother and her baby live in his apartment now because Rose killed the young George in 1979, and no one,including John,remembers him except Mary! Rose also finds Mary as a little girl walking with her mother,and Mary sees her in the background in her childhood pictures with her mother! John has talked to Rose to get her to back off but next Rose kills John as a little boy and buries him in the pantry too and now John's parents remember him as their little boy who disappeared when he was young!Mary knocks down the bricks in the pantry and finds rotten skeletons! Terrified she disposes of them!
Mary tries to use her knowledge of Rose's future as a weapon and lead Rose into a traffic accident but she fails and now Rose is after revenge!Mary has discovered that Rose went into a mental institution but has now in the present mysteriously vanished after checking herself out! The 1979 Rose threatens to exact her terrible revenge, not on Mary in the present but on Mary as a child in the past. She lures Mary as a little girl into the apartment and burns her with scalding hot water from the stove and the burns appear on older Mary.Mary finally realizes that she will have to kill Rose in order to save herself. But how can she kill someone living in the past? The question is solved when present day older Rose starts breaking into the apartment to kill adult Mary.Rose has apparently been lying in wait all these years.Mary has to tell her fleeing childhood self over the phone to stab young Rose with something.Little Mary stabs 1979 Rose with a broken piece of glass from a mirror in the throat as she comes toward her,and older Rose vanishes just as she breaks into the bathroom to kill adult Mary.Adult Mary hears child Mary on the phone sobbing that 1979 Rose is lying dead with eyes wide open. Adult Mary tells her younger self to get out of the apartment and go home now.
All is at least well enough now, except somehow history has been altered by all this and Mary is now still living with her ex-husband in the apartment.He comes home in a mean mood and strikes her and says it's her fault,but Mary has changed too and she kills her husband and bricks up his body in the pantry!
In the deleted bonus ending Mary has moved away and a young couple moves into the apartment and the rotary phone starts ringing again.
