For whom the bell rings
Serial killer movies and TV shows are common as dirt, and most of the serial killers within them feel a bit commonplace as well: you've got your brutish animal menace, you've got your erudite reptilian wits, you've got your soft-spoken weirdo with an unnerving stare. There aren't all that many movie serial killers who actually feel like they have an unknowable, genuinely diseased brain, and for that alone I would be ready to extend praise to The Black Phone: it is profoundly uncomfortable to watch its killer when he's onscreen. He's a child murderer known to locals in suburban Denver, in the summer of 1978, as "The Grabber", and he's played by Ethan Hawke, who is digging down with distressing enthusiasm into sing-songy vocal tics and disjointed, artificial hand gestures. It's quite horrible to watch, in the best way, a great example of what happens when a strong actor is hired for a grotty little part. There is something deeply filthy and hideously starving in Hawke's eyes, which are almost exclusively what we see of his face (the character is mostly wearing a modular demon mask with two mouths, one a judgmental frown and one a toothy grin; co-designed by the horror makeup legend Tom Savini, it feels like nothing that a middle class nobody in 1970s Colorado would be likely to come upon, but it creates such a perfectly shocking, unnerving effect that I don't think it's worth getting pissy about that). And there's something lonely and wheedling in his voice, suggesting someone with a lifetime of being unable to form any kind of positive relationship, without ever coming close to making the Grabber sympathetic or even understandable - comprehensible, maybe, but only in a way that sharpens how deeply evil he comes across.
That all being said, The Black Phone isn't a film about the Grabber - Hawke doesn't even get all that much screentime. It's about the lingering threat of the Grabber, moreso than his presence. More specifically, it's about a boy of around 12 or 13, Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), who becomes the sixth tween boy Grabbed off the street over the summer of '78. He spends the second and third acts of the film locked in a damp basement with one barred window for light and an ancient mattress, bolted to the floor, as the only thing in the way of furniture. The only thing else in the room - it's a pretty undeniable contrivance, and the entire concept of the film hinges on it, but the filmmakers charge through it fast enough that we're not invited to notice or think about it - is a wall-mounted black phone that's not connected to anything. This proves to be the physical link to the spiritual world, and over the course of his days and nights in hell, Finney receives several ghostly calls from the five boys who preceded him in this dungeon, and while they aren't all equally able to communicate in a clear and non-terrifying way, they provide him with fragments of knowledge that they gleaned while alive, which start to combine into a possible way to escape.
Over in the B-plot, we see that Finney isn't the only Shaw with psychic powers: his little sister Gwen (Madeline McGraw) has in fact been having premonitory dreams for some while now, and while their alcoholic widower father Terrence (Jeremy Davies) has been trying to beat this out of her during his angry benders, she still finds time to set up a little dollhouse shrine and pray for visions of Finney's whereabouts. And these visions come, though they're at least as cryptic and frightening as they are helpful, meaning that she needs to do some work biking around town to find the landmarks in her dreams.
Before it gets to either of these plots, The Black Phone spends an unfortunate amount of time warming up, and it is not, in truth, at all exciting to watch. The film was adapted by Scott Derrickson & C. Robert Cargill from a 2004 short story by Joe Hill, who will always be best-known, no matter how many well-regarded works he publishes, as the middle child of horror novelist Stephen King, and it's impossible to ignore how much the opening act of film has a certain whiff of reheated King leftovers. This is especially true of the slightly wretched dialogue that has been loaded onto the child actors (I do not know if Derrickson & Cargill or Hill are the primary culprits, only that whoever did it should be embarrassed), especially McGraw, who gives a pretty great performance despite how much the script seems to be sabotaging it. The exposition is pretty rough, full of awkwardly-phrased "as we all know..." style lines, and it has been further compounded by the extremely bad Kingian habit of larding up the kids' lines with pointless, nonstop swearing. This isn't always bad - I think you'd need a heart of stone not to laugh at least a little bit at a petulant little girl starting her prayers out with a very earnest "Jesus, what the fuck?" - but it's pretty tiresome and artless, a stab at adult meanness that starts out feeling like a cliché and gets worse from there.
The Black Phone doesn't need help feeling mean; it has a pretty bleak and worn-out mood that's only amplified by the amount of time spent in that terrible basement watching Finney grow more exhausted and freaked-out by the minute. Derrickson, who also directs, and cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz haven't exactly tried to replicate the look of 1970s movies (other than a few key sequences shot on 8mm that have been blown up till they're just pure film grain, it looks like a film shot on digital), but they've embraced a certain world-weary '70s vibe, nudging the images towards yellow in a way that makes them feel dried out and sucked clean of life, a bit hopeless and hungover. The film name-drops The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it's not even completely self-serving and ridiculous for it to have done so; in a very simplified way, it captures the same "everything is ugly and shitty" vibe of the '70s as a period of decay and decline in the fabric of society.
None of which makes that first act any less of a meandering trudge, stiffly laying out pieces on the board for later. But it does set the film up to take great advantage of its hostile, crummy mood when Finney ends up in that basement, and Derrickson engages in what I think is easily the best filmmaking of his career (only a few key scenes from 2012's Sinister, also starring Hawke, match it). It's a hell of a thriller, sweaty and panicky, full of the pregnant possibility of the killer just popping in at any random moment, and somehow it's much worse that he never actually does. Derrickson uses jump scares sparingly, but they all land, and he's even better at using the conspicuous absence of jump scares, just the look of Thames's gaunt, worried face waiting for anything to happen. And that's before Finney's psychic abilities have gotten keyed up enough that he can start seeing the dead boys, who manage the neat trick of being shocking and threatening to look at and hear whisper their ghostly whispers, even after the script has made it unambiguously clear that they're on Finney's side.
The Black Phone has simply phenomenal thriller mechanics, to put it bluntly, so tightly-built that it's deliciously watchable even despite how utterly vicious and draining its content is. The balance between the crawling horrors of Finney's story with the release of tension in the funnier (but never flippant) Gwen scenes is well-honed, letting the film recharge and smack into the viewer again every time the pendulum swings back. I'm not sure, despite the feints at character drama and "stand up to bullies" personal growth, that there's really anything here but a sleek machine for wringing all the sweat possible from a tensed-up audience, but when the machine is this sleek, does there need to be?
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
That all being said, The Black Phone isn't a film about the Grabber - Hawke doesn't even get all that much screentime. It's about the lingering threat of the Grabber, moreso than his presence. More specifically, it's about a boy of around 12 or 13, Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), who becomes the sixth tween boy Grabbed off the street over the summer of '78. He spends the second and third acts of the film locked in a damp basement with one barred window for light and an ancient mattress, bolted to the floor, as the only thing in the way of furniture. The only thing else in the room - it's a pretty undeniable contrivance, and the entire concept of the film hinges on it, but the filmmakers charge through it fast enough that we're not invited to notice or think about it - is a wall-mounted black phone that's not connected to anything. This proves to be the physical link to the spiritual world, and over the course of his days and nights in hell, Finney receives several ghostly calls from the five boys who preceded him in this dungeon, and while they aren't all equally able to communicate in a clear and non-terrifying way, they provide him with fragments of knowledge that they gleaned while alive, which start to combine into a possible way to escape.
Over in the B-plot, we see that Finney isn't the only Shaw with psychic powers: his little sister Gwen (Madeline McGraw) has in fact been having premonitory dreams for some while now, and while their alcoholic widower father Terrence (Jeremy Davies) has been trying to beat this out of her during his angry benders, she still finds time to set up a little dollhouse shrine and pray for visions of Finney's whereabouts. And these visions come, though they're at least as cryptic and frightening as they are helpful, meaning that she needs to do some work biking around town to find the landmarks in her dreams.
Before it gets to either of these plots, The Black Phone spends an unfortunate amount of time warming up, and it is not, in truth, at all exciting to watch. The film was adapted by Scott Derrickson & C. Robert Cargill from a 2004 short story by Joe Hill, who will always be best-known, no matter how many well-regarded works he publishes, as the middle child of horror novelist Stephen King, and it's impossible to ignore how much the opening act of film has a certain whiff of reheated King leftovers. This is especially true of the slightly wretched dialogue that has been loaded onto the child actors (I do not know if Derrickson & Cargill or Hill are the primary culprits, only that whoever did it should be embarrassed), especially McGraw, who gives a pretty great performance despite how much the script seems to be sabotaging it. The exposition is pretty rough, full of awkwardly-phrased "as we all know..." style lines, and it has been further compounded by the extremely bad Kingian habit of larding up the kids' lines with pointless, nonstop swearing. This isn't always bad - I think you'd need a heart of stone not to laugh at least a little bit at a petulant little girl starting her prayers out with a very earnest "Jesus, what the fuck?" - but it's pretty tiresome and artless, a stab at adult meanness that starts out feeling like a cliché and gets worse from there.
The Black Phone doesn't need help feeling mean; it has a pretty bleak and worn-out mood that's only amplified by the amount of time spent in that terrible basement watching Finney grow more exhausted and freaked-out by the minute. Derrickson, who also directs, and cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz haven't exactly tried to replicate the look of 1970s movies (other than a few key sequences shot on 8mm that have been blown up till they're just pure film grain, it looks like a film shot on digital), but they've embraced a certain world-weary '70s vibe, nudging the images towards yellow in a way that makes them feel dried out and sucked clean of life, a bit hopeless and hungover. The film name-drops The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it's not even completely self-serving and ridiculous for it to have done so; in a very simplified way, it captures the same "everything is ugly and shitty" vibe of the '70s as a period of decay and decline in the fabric of society.
None of which makes that first act any less of a meandering trudge, stiffly laying out pieces on the board for later. But it does set the film up to take great advantage of its hostile, crummy mood when Finney ends up in that basement, and Derrickson engages in what I think is easily the best filmmaking of his career (only a few key scenes from 2012's Sinister, also starring Hawke, match it). It's a hell of a thriller, sweaty and panicky, full of the pregnant possibility of the killer just popping in at any random moment, and somehow it's much worse that he never actually does. Derrickson uses jump scares sparingly, but they all land, and he's even better at using the conspicuous absence of jump scares, just the look of Thames's gaunt, worried face waiting for anything to happen. And that's before Finney's psychic abilities have gotten keyed up enough that he can start seeing the dead boys, who manage the neat trick of being shocking and threatening to look at and hear whisper their ghostly whispers, even after the script has made it unambiguously clear that they're on Finney's side.
The Black Phone has simply phenomenal thriller mechanics, to put it bluntly, so tightly-built that it's deliciously watchable even despite how utterly vicious and draining its content is. The balance between the crawling horrors of Finney's story with the release of tension in the funnier (but never flippant) Gwen scenes is well-honed, letting the film recharge and smack into the viewer again every time the pendulum swings back. I'm not sure, despite the feints at character drama and "stand up to bullies" personal growth, that there's really anything here but a sleek machine for wringing all the sweat possible from a tensed-up audience, but when the machine is this sleek, does there need to be?
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
