The trailers for The Black Phone made it look a lot like a standard horror movie. Creepy killer with a kid in his basement. There are some ghosts, some jump scares, and a few other things that look like nothing all that special. But the reviews started coming in, and they were good. Director Scott Derrickson had worked with actor Ethan Hawke before, and the plot came from a story by Joe Hill. I haven’t read as much of Hill’s work as I have his father Stephen King’s, but I have liked a lot of what he’s done. Perhaps I might even luck out and get another private showing by going to a late morning, midweek matinee as well.
No such luck on that last part as four folks walked in just as the movie was starting, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the movie won’t be any good. It just meant I had to try and ignore those folks a’hootin’ and a’hollerin’ during one of the more suspenseful scenes because yes, that happened.
It’s 1978 in a suburb of Denver, and someone referred to only as The Grabber (Hawke, and that is the only name he’s known by in the movie) has been snatching young boys off the street. Middle schooler Finney (Mason Thames) is a frequent target of abuse by bullies and his alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies), but he has a very close relationship to his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), also a target of their drunken father’s rages. Gwen, however, seems to have psychic dreams about the Grabber’s victims, and that helps when Finney is himself grabbed that Gwen might be able to help find him. She’s already proven her reliability to the local cops.
But as it is, Finney will need to survive the ordeal himself. Waking up in a dark, soundproofed basement, he finds the Grabber has locked him in there with just a mattress and a disconnected black telephone. However, Finney finds himself hearing the phone ring, and when he answers the phone, the Grabber’s previous victims are on the other end of the line. Each offers him some advice on how Finney can keep himself alive based on the mistakes they themselves all made. But Finney himself has a history of not-fighting-back. Can he rise to the occassion?
OK, so, this was as good as I had heard. It’s not great, but it’s a tightly told movie, running a little over an hour and a half. Hawke is brilliant and mesmerizing as the Grabber, a man whose mood seems to change with whatever form of his shifting demon mask he’s currently wearing, and Davies actually finds a way to give it a bit more nuance to the often stereotypical alcoholic father. However, the story itself really helps there. Most of the movie’s jumpscares, indeed most of the movie’s ghost scenes, are all in the trailer. Instead, the movie is more of a survivalist thriller than a supernatural horror. That comes in part because the ghosts that call Finney are not actually all that useful. They don’t often have much to say, and about all they can offer is to tell him what they tried to do to escape with one noteworthy exception, but that was one of the movie’s highlights and I won’t elaborate on it beyond that.
However, the Gwen plot didn’t seem to work quite so well. She has her psychic dreams and she gives the cops some good pointers, but ultimately, she doesn’t offer much to the survival aspects of the story. That’s not to say the Gwen plot is useless. The character has a nice arc, her dreams are well-done, and the young actress does a good job, but that part of the movie was not as compelling as the Finney stuff. That’s not really the fault of anyone. It’s just Hawke’s performance and the Finney character’s ingenuity that makes the movie as good as it is.
Grade: B
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