The Black Phone (Movie Review)

When Sinister premiered in 2012, it didn’t just usher in a lasting boogeyman in the form of Bagul, it also marked the beginning of a formative creative partnership between Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. The duo struck success in the Marvel universe with 2016’s Doctor Strange and have now made their return to the horror genre with The Black Phone, a bleak beast of a film that feels like a natural extension from their Sinister team up.

Based on the short story of the same name by Joe Hill, The Black Phone is set in 1978 amongst a small community in Denver, CO that is dealing with a rash of disappearances of the local youth by a perpetrator dubbed, The Grabber (Ethan Hawke). Finney (Nathan Thames) and his sister Gwen (Madeline McGraw) try to go about their lives, enduring their abusive alcoholic father, when the disappearances start to hit closer to home. And then the unthinkable strikes; Finney is kidnapped by The Grabber and placed in a makeshift concrete prison a basement left to await his fate. However, hanging ominously on the cracked, stained walls sits a black phone—line severed with no way to reach the outside world. The living world anyway. Eventually Finney hears the phone ring and on the other end, the ghosts of those who came before him try to give him clues on how to survive. Meanwhile, while Gwen attempts to use her potentially supernatural gifts in the form of visions that come to her in her dreams to find clues to Finney’s location before it’s too late.

The Black Phone is not a surprising movie. From start to finish it is a tried and true exercise in building and sustaining tension. And it succeeds a lot more often than it doesn’t. The building of tension takes a bit to find its momentum, but what it is doing during that time is presenting an emotional and sweet relationship between Gwen and Finney. A pair of young souls just trying to hold on to their innocence despite the challenges in front of them. Their dynamic is essentially the heart and soul of Derrickson and Cargill’s bleak world projected within The Black Phone. Setting this in the late 70’s really helps to paint the dark and seemingly hopeless situation that Finney finds himself in. The police are more or less useless, made evident by the fact that they’re so desperate they begin to take any lead they can get through Gwen’s visions.

Once Hawke first appears as The Grabber, the tension instantly spikes. The Grabber becomes less complex as a villain as the film goes on, but no less imposing and dangerous. Hawke imbues the character with mystery and menace by constantly shifting his tone, but also because you never get a full glimpse of his face. What could be a gimmicky touch to force tension and horror, the masks are as much a character as The Grabber himself. The novelty never really grows stale because the mask is always changing. There are variations that have eyes but no mouth, half masks that show Hawke’s mouth or that cover his mouth but not his eyes, and of course other full masks that have numerous facial expressions which often add to the unsettling nature of The Grabber’s mental state as a whole.

The supernatural aspects of The Black Phone surely make it plausible that it and Sinister could exist in the same universe—though obviously decades apart. Gwen’s visions and Finney’s communication with the dead are hallmarks of Stephen King’s literature and therefore inevitably bleed into Hill’s work with a deja vu-like similarity. Derrickson and Cargill are able to extend this out remarkably well without it ever feeling like it belonged on the page in short form. And they never feel the need to over explain Gwen’s “gift” but do give it some tragic context as a shared trait of her and Finney’s mother. However, just how the phone works is a less explained oddity, but full of mystery in and of itself as it flatly lines out rules and fading memories of the ghosts speaking to Finney and that believing in the impossible could have a little something to do with its mysterious and horrific operation.

The Black Phone is a grim and dirty film that only lets you come up for air incrementally to let Madeline McGraw charm and delight you with her scene stealing bursts of adolescent cursing and James Ransone’s drug-fueled faux detective outburst. Otherwise, this is a film that throws you into the deep end with one particular and bloodthirsty shark as you watch and cheer for Finney and Gwen to be reunited once again with the help of those who were not so lucky. The Black Phone is another winner for the Derrickson/Cargill team and more evidence as to why they are a filmmaking duo the genre should keep as close as possible.