For fans of the horror genre, the arrival of the big summer blockbuster also marks the beginning of big summer thrills. The newest from Blumhouse drops us into a small Colorado suburb in 1978 that is the recent victim of a series of child abductions. We witness the usual conventions of a coming-of-age story: hearts are left out on the baseball field, two bullies engage in a brutal fistfight on the sidewalk, and a pair of school crushes flirt through flashes of eye contact. We meet Finney (Mason Thames), a quiet middle-schooler who lives inside his head and is too afraid to stand up for himself. That is, until he becomes the latest captive of a man in a top hat and painted face, the part-time amateur magician known throughout the town as “The Grabber.” When Finney wakes up, he finds himself in a soundproof basement with few resources other than a mattress, a toilet, several rugs, and a mysterious black phone that rings regularly despite not being connected to anything.
The Black Phone is directed and co-written by Scott Derrickson, who adapts the short story of the same name by Joe Hill, who is Stephen King’s son. Derrickson reteams with his Sinister lead actor, Ethan Hawke, for what is being campaigned as the screen veteran’s first true villain role.
The true heart of the film lies in Finney’s relationship with his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), an intensely precocious nine-year-old who swears at adults and bashes a bully’s head open with a rock in defense of her brother. Gwen also experiences dreams – presented in the form of analog film footage – that reveal details of the town’s multiple abductions, and the detectives on the case start to use them to their advantage. A young girl becomes the hero of the film’s outer obstacle, while Finney’s role is to conquer the inner obstacle of his inability to fight for himself. Together, they live with their father (Jeremy Davies), a physically abusive alcoholic who is responsible for the film’s most harrowing depiction of horror: a scene of domestic violence that may be very upsetting for some viewers who are caught off guard by its inclusion.
The further we get into the film, the clearer it becomes that there’s little more to the mystery of the plot beyond what’s already expressed in the film’s initial premise and marketing campaign. It’s a deceptively straight-forward story, with its success reliant on each viewer’s personal taste as to whether the genre sequences and filmmaking style are enough to elevate it. The major moments of horror come in the form of the Grabber’s previous victims, who first make contact by communicating with Finney through the titular black phone, before appearing as ghosts in their pale and bloodied forms. While inconsistent in its rules — Finney can sometimes see them and sometimes not — the psychological effect of seeing the physical ghosts in frame, while still hearing their dialogue as it would sound through the receiver of a telephone, is particularly unsettling. However, despite the thrill of a few well-placed jump scares, the horror moments tend to feel more like a treat for the audience rather than something grounded in the perspective of the characters; the possibility of dead children appearing keeps us on our toes despite the context that they are actually trying to help Finney escape.
Much of the film rests on the performances of its first-time lead and first-time villain. For his young age, Mason Thames brings a mature ability to show an interior life that feels natural to how a child would react in this situation. Hidden behind a series of devilish masks, Ethan Hawke utilizes his distinctive voice and a wide range of vocal inflections to shift between an airiness that allows him to be delightfully creepy, and a low growl that makes him truly menacing. The focus on the many young characters in the screenplay results in secondary adult characters who are written with much less depth and narrative soundness. This includes a pair of detectives who seem to stake their investigations on the dreams of a young girl, a local cocaine user who serves as a tonally inconsistent source of comedic levity, and the aforementioned abusive father who’s given an entirely off-screen redemption arc.
Many will be quick to point out the overt similarities between this film and the work of Stephen King – there’s even a direct visual reference to one of his best-known stories – as well as its connection to various pieces of recent media that sentimentalize this particular era through the popcorn entertainment of genre storytelling. The Black Phone’s greatest strength lies in Derrickson’s ability to mostly avoid any notion of this nostalgia, instead presenting a small town entrenched in a feeling of desolation that refuses to ease up over the entire runtime. While the story might be better suited as a straight crime thriller, it’s still the supernatural element of a moody ghost story that makes The Black Phone hauntingly distinctive.
