The Black Phone

It is 1978, in North Den­ver, and Lit­tle Lea­guer Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), on the cusp of ado­les­cence, is liv­ing in con­stant ter­ror – and not just the usu­al teen angst about whether he can attract the atten­tion of the girl he likes in his class (Rebec­ca Clarke), but also the very real fear that, even if he man­ages to endure run­ning the gaunt­let of var­i­ous con­tem­po­raries at school look­ing to beat him up, back at home he or his younger sis­ter Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) might get the belt from their own father (Jere­my Davies), who is vio­lent, volatile alcoholic.

Lurk­ing some­where in the back­ground of all this is a mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure, dubbed ​‘The Grab­ber’ (Ethan Hawke) by the press – a ser­i­al killer who has been abduct­ing young boys from the street, and who has come to embody all the fears of this com­mu­ni­ty. Soon Finney will be snatched too, held pris­on­er in The Grabber’s sound-proofed base­ment – and if his friend Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), who would fear­less­ly take on all com­ers and keep the school bul­lies blood­i­ly at bay, was unable to over­come his child-killing cap­tor and get away, what hope does Finney have?

Finney, though, has two unusu­al, super­nat­ur­al edges in his har­row­ing predica­ment. The first is that his sis­ter, like his late moth­er, has para­nor­mal dreams which give her hints and clues as to Finney’s expe­ri­ences and loca­tion – and the sec­ond is that The Grabber’s pre­vi­ous vic­tims keep call­ing Finney, impos­si­bly, on a dis­con­nect­ed black phone and guid­ing him through steps for how to suc­ceed in stay­ing alive where they had failed. These two sto­ry­lines, Gwen’s out­side the base­ment and Finney’s inside, play out in par­al­lel with­out ever tru­ly inter­sect­ing, and it is eas­i­ly pos­si­ble to imag­ine The Black Phone dis­pens­ing alto­geth­er with Gwen’s clair­voy­ant pur­suit of her broth­er with­out los­ing any of its nar­ra­tive tra­jec­to­ry or outcome.

Still, Gwen is a great char­ac­ter, sweary and kick­ass where a typ­i­cal cin­e­mat­ic medi­um would be fey and ethe­re­al – and if her sub­plot feels a lit­tle like padding, at least it allows the view­er to leave the oppres­sive space of The Grabber’s bru­tal­ist bunker. Of course, Gwen’s cri­sis of faith when faced with the prob­lem of unspeak­able evil, mak­ing her begin to doubt her con­vic­tion that her visions come from a benign Jesus, allows direc­tor/­co-writer Scott Der­rick­son to bring in the Chris­t­ian pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of his ear­li­er The Exor­cism of Emi­ly Rose and Deliv­er Us From Evil. The devil’s mask that the Grab­ber wears fits rights into this fram­ing of events as a reli­gious strug­gle between Christ-like good and Satan­ic evil.

Adapt­ed from Joe Hill’s short sto­ry of the same name, The Black Phone also comes with cin­e­mat­ic influ­ences. It reunites Der­rick­son with his co-writer C. Robert Cargill and his star Hawke from Sin­is­ter, and repris­es from that film a dis­tinc­tive mark­ing scratched across the basement’s con­crete walls. More in keep­ing with the late Sev­en­ties set­ting, Finney and Robin duly namecheck both The Texas Chain Saw Mas­sacre – which Finney is not allowed to watch – and Enter the Drag­on, and sure enough this does include both mar­tial arts and sev­er­al dys­func­tion­al fam­i­lies (one mur­der­ous). Yet it most­ly recalls the under­ground entrap­ment of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, only with the fur­ther taboo of much younger abductees, and with the addi­tion of venge­ful ghosts.

The indi­vid­ual instruc­tions that these ghosts give Finney may seem fruit­less, but come togeth­er with ele­gant serendip­i­ty in the end. For ulti­mate­ly this sto­ry of a young boy’s emer­gence exhibits strong tele­o­log­i­cal lean­ings, sug­gest­ing that all our endeav­ours – even our appar­ent fail­ures – ulti­mate­ly have a pur­pose in a grander scheme. Whether that scheme is God’s plan, or just instinc­tive pro­gram­ming to sur­vive, assim­i­late and evolve – indeed whether we have been wit­ness­ing phan­tom-led escape attempts, or a boy’s cop­ing mech­a­nism of psy­chogenic fugue – remains the film’s true mys­tery. Either way, for Finney this ordeal is less spir­i­tu­al jour­ney than rite of pas­sage, as the 13-year-old must learn to stand up for him­self (and for oth­ers) and to over­come his fear.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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