Allow me to set the scene. It’s 1978 and kids are getting snatched up off the street — literally. We’re in Northern Denver, a dreary Colorado suburb where local abductor and serial killer “The Grabber” is on the loose, and 13-year-old Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) is his next victim.
Finney is already living in his own nightmare. He and his fearless 11-year-old sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) are under the care of their father (Jeremy Davies) whose grief of losing his wife to suicide years prior has turned him into an angry drunk. When Finney isn’t on the end of his father’s belt, he’s getting bullied at school. Finney and Gwen are thick as thieves. Even though she’s two years younger, Gwen is protective of Finney and isn’t afraid to jump into a fight to defend her brother.
One day on his walk home from school, Finney is grabbed by the masked man and thrown into a soundproof cemented room complete with a dingy mattress, disgustingly dirty toilet, and an old black rotary phone hanging on the wall. Even though it’s disconnected, Finney can hear The Grabber’s previous victims through the phone and what they have to say might save his life.
Adapted from Joe Hill’s short story of the same name, The Black Phone is a suspenseful thriller that offers up real-life horrors for a spine-chilling story that sneaks under your skin and follows you home. Hill’s original story was inspired by a childhood memory of living in a very old house in Bangor, Maine. “There was a phone in the basement that wasn’t connected to anything, and I found that phone creepy and unsettling. It didn’t make sense for a phone to be in a basement with a dirt floor and crumbling concrete walls. As a kid, the worst thing I could imagine was that phone ringing,” Hill said. In the movie, however, the phone ringing is the best thing that could happen for Finney. Each call gives him hope that he might actually be able to escape the fate of the Grabber’s other victims.
Directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister), the film is simplistic yet effective in its delivery of creep. Derrickson’s style doesn’t rely heavily on jump scares or inordinate sequences. Instead, the audience is slowly submerged into quiet darkness that makes your gut churn, almost as if you’re being enveloped by the presence of fear until you yourself are scared.
The Grabber is played by Oscar-nominated chameleon, Ethan Hawke who effortlessly achieves the character by coupling what feels like lenient wickedness with what grows into a truly menacing villain. He doesn’t have to say much. There were moments where Hawke’s presence on screen delivered a dialogue louder than anything he could say. In one scene we see him sitting in a chair, belt in hand, shirt off, mask on — waiting. #Chills
But Hawke’s performance doesn’t overshadow the young stars Thames and McGraw who carried the film from beginning to end.
Written by Derrickson and his frequent writing partner C. Robert Cargill, the story is somewhat predictable. It’s easy to identify where the story will go but the journey they take to get there proves to be worthwhile in the end.
Unlike other stories, we didn’t get a backstory for TheGrabber, which was kind of a bummer. It’s always interesting to dive into the psyche of a sadistic villain, but alas, we’ll just have to wonder what his deal is, why he only takes boys, and where he got those masks. Instead, we did get mini flashbacks of what the taken kids were doing before they were grabbed which sort of seemed like a waste of runtime because there wasn’t a cohesive reason as to why they were “grabbed”.
Despite the loose ends and unexplored backstory, the duo delivered several creative decisions that overshadowed the other pitfalls. Setting the film in the late ‘70s before the evolution of technology dialed up the anxiety. There’s no cell phone to be traced. People taken in those days were just… gone. The subtle changes in The Grabber’s mask each time he came into the room helped the suspense to swell.
We also didn’t see the abuse done to the children abducted by the Grabber. The ambiguity of not seeing what the Grabber does to his victims allowed the audience to tap into their own imagination which intensified the spookiness of the phone conversations.
A light-handed horror centered on child abduction, The Black Phone also explores children’s resilience. In the film, the children save themselves. It’s a coming-of-age story that shows that there isn’t only strength in fighting, but also strength in enduring, too.
It doesn’t quite lie in the same vein as some of Derrickson’s other horror works, such as Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but this film packs the same punch. Oddly triumphant for a horror film, The Black Phone presents a well-rounded chiller with cast performances that’ll make you beg for a sequel.
Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
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