Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone has one hell of a logline, which is simple enough to draw one in and enticing enough to maintain their attention throughout its 90-odd minute runtime. Based on a short story by Joe Hill (the accomplished horror author who made a name for himself in the scene before it was revealed that he was the son of Stephen King), the film concerns the object of its title: A black wall-mounted rotary phone, its connection wires severed, sitting in a basement in some part of suburbia at some point in the ’80s. It’s the first thing Finney (Madison Thames) sees when he wakes up on a dirty mattress, heaving and bloating in some bizarre manner after he had a strange encounter on his way home from school with a top-hatted man who spilled eggs on the ground in front of him and offered to show him a magic trick. That was, of course, a ruse, and the man drugged Finney, leading him to his current predicament. He slowly realizes he’s been snatched by “The Grabber” (Ethan Hawke), a killer who’s been preying on the boys of this small town, seizing them from the street and spiriting them away to some unknown location. The man wears a mask, either sporting a horrific grin or a terrifying frown, and he alternates between threatening him and telling him that he just might let him go.
Almost immediately, Finney begins to look for a way out, but his options are limited: There’s a solitary window just out of reach, covered in bars, and there’s a second room with some rolled-up carpets and a toilet, and it seems like he might fully be stuck. But, bizarrely, the phone begins to ring. The Grabber’s told him to ignore it, that it’s just his imagination, but he can’t help but pick up the receiver. On the other end of the line is the voice of one of the killer’s victims, and though he can’t remember his name, he can remember the circumstances of his death and who Finney is — he had that crazy arm in the ballgame a few weeks back — and offers up bits and pieces of advice to the kid. As the days go on, Finney gets more of these calls, and additional pieces of information: there’s a wire hidden in one of the walls that he can use to scale up to the top of the window, there’s a freezer on the other side of the soft drywall near the toilet, and one of them tried to dig a hole out in a soft spot in the ground. Importantly, he learns that the Grabber can hear the phone ringing as well, but he doesn’t want to believe it. So, as Finney plays the Grabber’s sick games, he begins to use this phenomenon and its help in order to try and escape.
Screen adaptations of Hill’s work haven’t been fantastic — Alexandre Aja’s Horns has probably come the closest to properly nailing the specific tone of his writing, and apparently, some of the small-screen works have been ok, like Locke and Key and NOS4A2 — but The Black Phone takes the best approach yet, in a way that other filmmakers have found success in bringing his father’s off-brand and minor works to a different medium. Hill, for all of his 800-odd page tomes and whatnot, is gifted with a similar panache for simple and incredibly compelling hooks, which usually show themselves off best in his short stories and novellas, and he’s nearly as prolific as his predecessor. Short stories are, oftentimes, more ideal for adaptation than novels, provided that the filmmaker and their collaborators can pull in enough of their own creativity to stretch them to feature-length, and Derrickson’s approach here highlights the successes and failures inherent to doing so. The film entices when it focuses on the meat of the story: Finney in the basement, looking to escape, haunted by these voices from this strange phone, pleading with him to improve on their failures, and Derrickson really manages to make it cinematic. In several cases, the dead kids’ ghosts are in the room with them, specters mouthing along to the static-y voices on the phone, covered in proof of the hell that the Grabber has put them through — blood, dirt, etc. — and it is intoxicatingly pulpy and propulsive.
Where he struggles is in the invented subplot about Finney’s sister, Gwen, who has visions wrapped in dreams that provide her with hints and clues as to where the Grabber is keeping her brother and his victims, which mainly offers up an excuse for Derrickson to use the 8mm creepiness he used so well in Sinister in a far less effective fashion. The content of these dreams is basically home-movie assortments meshed with the occasionally creepy flourish, like, say, Hawke standing in front of his dilapidated suburban home, in mask and top hat, holding a bouquet of black balloons, but it feels pigeonholed into the film so that Derrickson can establish a stylistic throughline through his horror work in the last decade (one wonders if the dispute with Feige that led with him departing Doctor Strange 2 had something to do with him wanting to use the format in that film). But she’s never given a particularly compelling plotline, especially when it feels so derivative of other King-related works, which Hill has spent so much of his career as a writer trying to defy. Why have her shine like Danny Torrence when the film is so solid without it, even if listening to children swear at cops will always get a laugh? There’s just no need for this padding, which pumps the brakes on the building panic and high strangeness happening within the confines of that basement.
Yet that doesn’t prevent The Black Phone from working as intended, and what remains is a solid little horror flick that will definitely amuse and captivate most while they’re watching it. I have a strange feeling that this will be regarded as a cult classic in 10 years or so if it isn’t an immediate success (people lap up period horror nowadays, especially when it’s about kids livin’ in the ’80s, to quote Killing Joke), and it’s a wonderful reminder of what Derrickson can do when he’s working outside of the Marvel world. It’s also yet another proof that Hawke’s mid-career renaissance is one of the best happening among the concurrent ones of actors of a similar age (though folks who have seen First Reformed or Tesla really need no convincing of that), and it’s wonderful to see how much he relishes playing an out-and-out bad dude here. His vocal work here is sublime, lilting and diving octaves almost in the same sentence, paired wonderfully with the physicality of his performance: When stripped of the charisma inherent to his face, he relies on posture to suggest the creepy instability of his character, and it’s delightfully theatrical, playing in ways subtle and overt. If only the movie possessed his same sensibility throughout the entire runtime, we might be dealing with a modern popcorn horror classic on our hands here. Instead, it’s just a pretty solid little movie, and to be fair, we need plenty of those in the world these days.