The Black Phone is a supernatural horror film from Scott Derrickson, written with C. Robert Cargill from Joe Hill’s 2004 short story, and it runs a tight 103 minutes on one location and one idea. Finney Blake, a shy but clever 13-year-old, is abducted by a serial child killer known as the Grabber and locked in a soundproof basement. On the wall is a disconnected phone. It rings. On the other end are the Grabber’s previous victims, and they are dead set on making sure Finney does not join them.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Finney and Gwen
Mason Thames plays Finney, and it is a real performance, not a child-actor placeholder. He is scared and smart in the right proportions, and the film’s tension depends on watching him assemble a plan from the fragments the dead boys give him. Madeleine McGraw plays his sister Gwen, whose dreams point her toward her brother, and she steals every scene she is in. The siblings’ relationship, sketched fast in the opening act, is what gives the basement stakes.
The Grabber
Ethan Hawke plays the killer behind a set of interchangeable masks, and the choice to hide a star’s face for most of the film is the film’s best. The masks do the acting. Hawke does the voice, and the voice is quiet, wheedling and completely without mercy. It is a villain built from restraint, and it is far more frightening than a monster would have been.
The Phone
The supernatural device is used sparingly, and that is why it works. Each call from a dead boy gives Finney one piece of what he needs, and the film turns the basement into a puzzle box whose solution is assembled from other children’s failures. The idea is Hill’s, and Derrickson trusts it enough not to over-explain.
The Period
The setting is late 1970s suburbia, and the film’s texture, the bikes and the bullies and the parents who are not paying attention, gives the horror a ground to stand on. Jeremy Davies plays the boys’ father, a drunk whose failures the film neither excuses nor lingers on. James Ransone appears as a man whose amateur investigation is the film’s one note of comedy.
Where It Falls Short
The structure is repetitive by nature. A phone rings, a clue arrives, a plan fails, repeat, and the middle section marks time. Gwen’s psychic thread is underdeveloped and resolves conveniently. The film’s violence is restrained to the point that the danger occasionally feels theoretical. And the ending, satisfying as it is, arrives with a neatness the rest of the film had avoided.
The Verdict
The Black Phone is a well-built, well-acted horror film with a great villain and a premise it handles with discipline. It became the first entry in a franchise, and the original earns that on its own terms.
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