Written by William Brooks
Scott Derrickson’s latest foray into horror combines the two scariest concepts known to man: middle-aged magicians and having to talk on the phone.
1978, suburban Colorado. A small town is plagued by oil crises, bell-bottom jeans, and a mysterious child kidnapper — colloquially and ridiculously known as The Grabber — played by Ethan Hawke. One sepia-tinged afternoon, our tween protagonist Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) is unceremoniously hurled into a giant creepy van with “ABRACADABRA” written in ominous lettering on the side and a parade of eerie black balloons clearly visible within. It really is always the ones you least suspect.
When Finney wakes up, he finds himself in a derelict basement dungeon with only a soiled mattress, a filthy toilet, and the titular broken rotary phone on the wall for company. No, he hasn’t been assigned a Bateson Hall studio (a slightly less cruel fate awaits). Instead, the disconnected landline begins to ring intermittently, and delivers quite literal lifelines from The Grabber’s past victims. Like feeding the answers to an escape room, the ghostly voices outline their own fatal mistakes, offering Finney a chance to avoid the same grisly fate as his phantom callers.
Illustration by William Brooks
Only after sitting through The Black Phone did I find out that it was based on a short story from Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King no less. Having since breezed through its modest thirty pages, I found the story as told in print to be a far more ruthlessly efficient and dramatic survival yarn than the one presented here by frequent screenwriting duo Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill (Sinister 2012; Doctor Strange 2016).
The difficulty with expanding such a concise, character-driven narrative into a feature-length film is that the tension is inherently slackened every time a concession is made to the demands of the runtime. The first thirty minutes linger rather aimlessly on generic coming-of-age business apparently inspired by The 400 Blows (1959) before getting to the actual kidnapping that we all know is coming anyway. Then, having established its ticking-clock hostage premise, the film keeps cutting away from Finney’s dilemma for curiously perfunctory scenes with his inexplicably clairvoyant and annoyingly precocious little sister (Madeleine McGraw).
Dumber still, The Grabber has a cokehead brother (James Ransone, another Sinister alumnus) who obliviously masquerades as an amateur detective on the case, in the very house above where Finney is being held. And yes, this is actually played for laughs. From a tonal standpoint, whacky comedy and child torture meet one another about as well as the German infantry did the Siberian winter. Then the film sets these three parallel narratives up for a rousing crescendo where all the pieces fall into place, but frustratingly, it’s all a feint: nothing comes together and everything fizzles out as it all lurches toward a largely unearned crowd-pleaser of an ending.
Perhaps in an attempt to capitalise on the Stephen King connection, Derrickson and Cargill borrow liberally from his playbook to further pad the runtime: sleepy suburbia, ominous balloons, yellow raincoats, vicious bullies, abusive parents, psychic kids, and even a hulking pet dog all amalgamate to form a King pastiche. It’s all the more shame therefore that the obvious King reference-point for this type of story was not more heavily mined for inspiration. And while the visual of The Grabber descending his basement staircase to find nothing but a Raquel Welch poster flapping idly in the breeze certainly has its allure, I was actually referring to Misery.
You see, the brilliance of the Annie Wilkes character as a locked-door horror antagonist lays not only in her violent and erratic nature, but also in her undeniable humanity. Accentuated by a superb performance by Kathy Bates, Annie’s loneliness, immaturity, imperiousness and hysteria are all afforded their due consideration as the story unfolds. Collectively, these array of (often contradictory) traits afford her character a rich psychological depth framed within the pitiable figure of a social outcast only capable of connecting to the world around her via literature.
Ethan Hawke does the very best with what he’s given as The Grabber, bringing a mercurial physicality to the role while oscillating between giggly, childlike wonder and menacing gruffness in his voice performance, but there’s surprisingly little underneath his awesome Tom Savini-designed magician mask. According to Derrickson: “if you add more to try to explain what that is, it just dilutes it”, while in various interviews Hawke has compared The Grabber’s nebulous raison d'être to Hopkins’ Lector and Ledger’s Joker. Of course, both of those characters at least managed to form compelling and meaningful relationships with their respective protagonists during their limited screentime. While the audience’s imagination can be a powerful tool in crafting horror cinema, here we are left only with a self-evident force of malevolence who seems more underdeveloped than enigmatic.
Ultimately, The Black Phone resembles little more than yet another highly derivative example of the kind of content Blumhouse now churns out on a depressingly regular basis. There’s nothing memorable about this movie (aside from Savini’s mask of course – coming to every Halloween party near you this October). In fact, it even pales in comparison to Derrickson’s earlier horror effort Sinister, which had its issues but at least also had the courage of its convictions. Here, supernatural hijinks clash with the film's supposed gritty realism, and it results in two different movies that aren't given their proper due, with both elements rendered frustratingly dull as a result.
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