Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Black Phone’ on VOD, a Heavy-Nostalgia Period Horror-Thriller Starring Ethan Hawke as a Serial Kidnapper

Now on VOD, The Black Phone marks a return to director Scott Derrickson’s roots after a brief dalliance with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Prior to 2016’s Doctor Strange, he helmed The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister, the latter featuring Ethan Hawke as its protagonist. Based on a short story by Joe Hill (a.k.a. The Son of Stephen King), The Black Phone reunites Derrickson with Hawke, now playing the antagonist, a serial childsnatcher known as – amusingly, I might add – The Grabber. So will the director-star duo’s new horror outing seize us and throw us in the back of the van and hold us captive, or just leave us standing on the sidewalk? So to speak, of course.

THE BLACK PHONE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 1978, so that means parents quaff Coors at their kids’ little league games and everyone needs a haircut. So it was better back then? Nah – there’s a scene of parental corporal punishment here that’s just miserable, and the neighborhood bullying is way out of hand. Things have changed; things haven’t changed. Life. It’s such a mixed bag no matter the era, ain’t it? Anyway. Finney (Mason Thames) is 13 and a pretty decent baseball pitcher, but he’s a constant target for the local a-holes’ homophobic slurs and fists. He’s meek and doesn’t stick up for himself, which leaves his sparkplug of a little sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), to defend him by clobbering a bully with a big rock. Their dad (Jeremy Davies) is a pathetic drunk, and their mom is dead. Thankfully, Finney and Gwen prop each other up when times are tough. Which, sadly, is far too often.

Here’s an example of the way things go in Finney and Gwen’s North Denver neighborhood: A big-boned bully named Moose finally gets his come-uppance at the hands and feet of Finney’s friend Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), who appears to know karate. A crowd gathers as Robin knocks the behemoth down and straddles his chest and beats his face over and over again until it’s bloody. Adults are nowhere to be found, of course. They’re probably off somewhere smoking a bunch of cigarettes. And maybe the lack of supervision is why a guy like The Grabber (Hawke) can get away with regularly abducting – and surely murdering – children, whose faces end up on missing-child fliers at the corner convenience store: “You don’t think they’re gonna find him do you?” Finney says, and Gwen responds matter-of-factly, “Not how they want to.”

The Grabber has a big black van, leaves behind black balloons as his signature, and wears a creepy kind of vaudevillian-devil mask with interchangeable smiles and frowns. Gwen has dreams that seem to be giving her clues about The Grabber’s misdeeds, and the cops consider her a budding psychic of sorts, following the leads she gives them. When her sad, cruel, pitiful, disapproving father isn’t looking, she prays to Jesus to give her dreams to help them find all the missing children – who inevitably are joined in their ranks by Finney. The Grabber drugs him and he wakes up in a grimy basement with a gross mattress, a toilet and a black rotary phone on the wall, although the line has been cut. Sometimes, ol’ Grabbypoo comes down to psychologically torment him or give him a meager plate of scrambled eggs and a bottle of lemon-lime soda, because kids back then didn’t drink water, ever. I would know. We subsisted on Kool-Aid that you made by dumping a metric ton of sugar into a pitcher of water. Oh yeah. How did we not end up dead from dehydration? I digress: The black phone rings. Strange. Finney answers, and it’s one of the dead kids. So is this a movie about the supernatural? Y/N?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Funny how I learned after I deemed The Black Phone “like It but actually good” that I learned Stephen King’s son wrote the source material. The dialogue directly references The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Derrickson replicates some of that throwbacky film-grain gritty-grimy visual aesthetic. The abduction and isolation made me think of Room, the harrowing drama that won Brie Larson an Oscar. It’s also populated with some Guillermo del Toro-esque non-malevolent ghosts – see Crimson Peak or especially The Devil’s Backbone. There’s a brief Videodrome homage, a tongue-in-cheeky It Follows-ish tone and the era-specific kids-on-their-own/lack-of-parental-supervision stuff is the same Spielbergian fodder that made Stranger Things a nostalgia-drenched pop-cultural phenomenon.

Performance Worth Watching: You’ll come away from The Black Phone loving Madeleine McGraw’s spitfire performance. Her characterization of Gwen is smart, resourceful, spirited and vulnerable, but most importantly, never precocious.

Memorable Dialogue: There are few things funner than a little girl getting on her knees to pray and saying, “Jesus, what the f—. WHAT. THE. F—! … Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?”

Sex and Skin: None. New movies that aren’t specifically about sex don’t have any sex in them. Even if they’re R-rated. Maybe that’s one thing about 1978 that was better than now?

Our Take: Late-1970s period detail goes a long way for The Black Phone, which stirs a thick syrup of – here’s that term yet again – era-specific serial-killer latchkey-kid dread into its atmospheric pot. That’s what feels real about this story, which otherwise pounds the Y in my supernatural: y/n question. Maybe if it suspended that question a little higher, prompting us to wonder if the ghosts in the movie are figments of our terrified abductee protagonist’s escapist imagination, the movie might’ve tightened up and been less a grab-bag of ideas and plot developments.

But I’m not supposed to be criticizing a film for what it isn’t. What it is is a reasonably satisfying, satisfactorily textured sort-of crowd-pleaser stocked with game performances and enough subtext to keep it from drifting from memory too quickly. Hawke employs a squeaky cackle and maintains an air of unpredictability for his character that’s simultaneously scary, playful and bleakly funny. Thames’ ability to traject the fears and nascent confidence of your average 13-year-old puts us firmly in his corner. McGraw is a revelation. And the nostalgic references – well, you can’t get away from the nostalgic references. They make so much film and TV go round lately, don’t they?

It’s a good, solid, lightly cheeky horror movie that’s just more than the sum of its many parts and influences. The ending sells itself as a bittersweet triumph, even if it lacks some of the punch and dramatic impact of, say, an It Follows or Hereditary. I’m also ambivalent about how seriously we should take it. Do we laugh it off or accept it as a reflection of generational trauma? Maybe we can do both?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Black Phone is an above-average nostalgio-scarefest with enough craft and vision to render it a standout among the many, many horror movies released every week/month/year.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream The Black Phone