The Black Phone is based on a supernatural story by Joe Hill and yet, interestingly, when you type the title into a search engine, inquiring minds on the internet are wondering if the film is based on a true story.
Fair enough. Hill, the author of Heart Shaped Box and the scion of Stephen King, has captured something that feels like an urban legend or creepy pasta.
Working with his Sinister co-creator and Doctor Strange writing partner, director Scott Derrickson preserves that real-world texture with a spooky tale of child abduction and maligned spirits.
In common with The Conjuring films, the period setting of a 1970s suburban Colorado town — replete with neglectful parents, head-kicking bullies, and absolutely no mobile communication — lends a credence to this Blumhouse joint’s paranormal aspects.
Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) is a young teen negotiating the fraught business of a classroom crush, avoiding the meaner boys in the school lavatories, and protecting his little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) from their abusive dad. Flyers for missing kids and chain fences line the dreary streets that Finney traverses. The unfortunate abductees, it is whispered, are victims of a masked kidnapper known as The Grabber. Using a goofy magician act, black balloons, and a van, The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) disappears Finney’s peers, friends, and finally Finney himself.
Finney finds himself alone in a locked basement, where he is terrorised by his kidnapper and by the disembodied voices of The Grabber’s victims who speak to Finney through the disconnected device of the title.
Derrickson is restrained with his jump scares and succinct with world-building. The Black Phone subverts any number of Spielbergian tropes — not to mention voguish nostalgia — with a grimy, bad-old-days version of the past. Hawke and Thames respectively give two big performances to enact a compelling cat-and-mouse game, in a film wherein even the supporting characters are richly drawn.
Exhibit A: McGraw’s religious preteen who may possess psychic powers, is sweet to her brother, subservient to her dad, and is simultaneously capable of swearing at the police and Jesus. Eerily effective entertainment.
