Review: The Black Phone

Set in the late 70s where children are being snatched by a masked killer nicknamed The Grabber (Ethan Hawke). Mason Thames and his sister Madeleine McGraw’s lives are affected by The Grabber. The former ending up being snatched by him, the latter having psychic visions via a dream about one of the kidnappings. Jeremy Davies plays their unstable father.

 

I don’t know how faithful this 2022 film is to the short story by Joe Hill, but if it is indeed representative, one suggests Mr. Hill needs to find influences beyond his father Stephen King in future. Directed by Scott Derrickson (“Hellraiser Inferno”, “Deliver Us From Evil”, “Sinister”) and adapted by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill (“Sinister”, “Doctor Strange”), the film initially looked quite promising to me and the reviews have certainly been good. The cinematography by Brett Jutkiewicz (“Ready or Not”) is stunning from the outset, and early on the story intrigued me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before I felt like I was watching a mixture of “IT” and “The Shining”. I started to get mad to be honest, because there was something genuinely creepy and intriguing here with the missing kids, but Hill’s treatment of that issue veers too far into his own father’s realm and never finds its own identity. At least, that’s if this is a faithful translation of Hill’s short story. Ethan Hawke’s pantomime performance as The Grabber makes the character seem like Pennywise filtered through Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka, which seemed like a Michael Jackson imitation. Honestly, I think dad should sue.

 

The performances are frankly not very impressive. Lead actor Mason Thames is just OK, and Hawke as I said is giving a pantomime performance. It’s artificial, you never buy into it beyond a surface level. Tim Curry hammed it up to high heaven as Pennywise, but there was an undercurrent of genuine, seedy menace there as well as an otherworldliness. The Grabber is just surface, he’s not a grabber. Best I can say is that you don’t think of Ethan Hawke, he successfully hides himself in the performance at least. Jeremy Davies is an acquired taste at the best of times, and he’s not having the best of times here. He’s wildly over-the-top without any call for it whatsoever. It’s an actor engaging in self-indulgent scenery chewing. Young Madeleine McGraw gives the best performance by far, but she’s not enough to save it.

 

An initially promising blend of horror and kidnapper/serial killer movie eventually offers up far too much familiarity to Stephen King. It might be a bit better than the recent adaptations of “IT” but for me that’s an extremely low bar. Very disappointing.

 

Rating: C+