Streamin’ King: ‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone’ on Netflix, A Supernatural iOS Communique From Beyond The Grave

Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, the new Netflix adaptation of SK’s novella from his 2020 collection If It Bleeds.

STREAMIN’ KING: MR. HARRIGAN’S PHONE

THE GIST: Boy takes job reading old novels aloud to reclusive billionaire retiree in their rural Maine town for years. Upon the iPhone’s ’07 debut, kid-turned-teen gets one as a gift and gives another to his patron, ultimately taking us to the supernatural intersection of Coming Of Age Ave. and Be Careful What You Wish For Blvd., complete with iOS-compatible communiques from beyond the grave.
PEDIGREE: Stars 19-year-old Jaeden Martell (young Bill Denbrough in the It duology, Knives Out) and Donald Sutherland, who at 87 has an Emmy, an honorary Academy Award, eight Golden Globe nominations (most recently last year for The Undoing), and almost 200 IMDb credits ranging from the M*A*S*H movie to The Hunger Games. Also features Kirby Howell-Baptiste (The Good Place), Joe Tippett (Mare of Easttown), Peggy J. Scott (Succession Season 1), and newcomer Colin O’Brien. Written and directed by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, last year’s The Little Things with Denzel Washington), produced by Blumhouse and Ryan Murphy—lately of Halloween Ends and Dahmer – Monster, respectively—with Stephen King as an EP. Score by Oscar nominee Javier Navarrete (Pan’s Labyrinth, Antlers), cinematography by Oscar nominee John Schwartzman (Jurassic World and Dominion, Armageddon).

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? If you truly love If It Bleeds and its opening salvo “Harrigan’s,” sure. It’s incredibly true to the story, down to the devil-themed lottery tickets and a heap of narration and dialogue. But the novella is 90 pages that could’ve been, if not an email, a 10-minute campfire story. One with a lot of overlap with King’s new novel that potential viewers are potentially reading, Fairy Tale. More on that in a bit.
One poignant aspect is that SK has prolifically written elderly characters—and bonding them with younger ones—since the 1970s. But he himself just turned 75 and has ruminated compellingly about the end of life in recent years, so that meta, lived-in layer adds something. The Tammy Wynette “Stand by Your Man” ringtone becomes much creepier translated from page to screen, and for a movie so in love with books, it’s a cute touch when every one Craig reads to Harrigan gets a subtitle. (Great bibliophile quotable passed from mentor to mentee in the novella: “Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.”)

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Besides being more competently made and whole-feeling than your average Netflix movie, there’s not much to this in the way of characters, plot, or settings. Your best hope is for it to get you genuinely wondering how you’d respond to its ethical/spiritual quandaries, but that’s far from a guarantee. It’s definitely not horror, but rather a contemplative, New England fall-scented drama that finally presents a Black Mirror-type what-if near the one-hour mark. It’s too reticent to commit to King’s spookier elements or expand on them; there’s nothing really scary about these texts from beyond the grave except for their existence. “C C C aa”? “aa. C C C x”?? And we’re putting those on billboards in Times Square and in Hollywood?

(By the way, King just translated those messages on Twitter.) Martell is in essentially every scene once he arrives, and he’s up to the task—and not totally dissimilar to his depiction of Bill Denbrough: gentle, intentional, understated, and engaged. The bully is more of a sad, open wound than your average self-hating numbskull; some good needle drops including Tame Impala; the idea of kids laying down hard tribal lines based on their cell phone brands in the late 2000s is wild. Also, what in the name of Cthulhu is happening in this teacher/student scene…?

6 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Harrigan’s and the September-released 600-pager Fairy Tale both spend lonnnng opening sections with a narrator reflecting on his boyhood with a widower father and an old man who brings friendship and mystery into his life. You may want to space them out.

2. When the titles for If It Bleeds’ novellas were unveiled, some Constant Readers speculated if this one would relate to The Dark Tower’s Earl Harrigan, an NYC street preacher shouting warnings of an impending “god-bomb,” i.e., “This country needs a BOMB, not a new-kew-lar one but a GAWD-BOMB, can you say hallelujah?”

3. King’s handful of executive producer credits have typically been on miniseries (Storm of the Century, The Shining, 11.22.63, Lisey’s Story) and shorter-lived shows (Under the Dome, Castle Rock, Mr. Mercedes). Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is only his second time producing a wide-release feature, following 2017’s best-left-forgotten The Dark Tower. The Maximum Overdrive writer/director/not-producer told Netflix’s Tudum that EPing means he gets “some vestige of creative control,” and recounted of Harrigan’s:

   “I had script approval, I had actor approval…but how are you going to turn down Jaeden Martell and Donald Sutherland? It’s a no-brainer. And the other thing is John Lee Hancock. Not only does he have a good track record, but I feel more comfortable when somebody writes and directs at the same time—keep it all in the same tent. There’s less friction, less back and forth. I feel some responsibility to do whatever I can to keep an eye on the project and say very gently, ‘I think this might not be the right way to go.’ But with Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, I never had that happen. It’s a scary story, but it’s… quiet. I like that.”

   He’s been waving the banner for the project hard, tweeting in August that it’s “nothing short of brilliant.”

4. Adorable how SK’s author son Joe Hill had a story adapted into The Black Phone (which kicks ass) in June, and months later we’ve got Mr. Harrigan’s Phone. 

5. Returning Kingverse participants: Donald Sutherland played baddie Richard Straker in 2004’s Salem’s Lot miniseries starring Rob Lowe and James Cromwell. Frank Ridley (small role as Reverend Mooney) had an also-small part on Castle Rock. Jaden Martell joins the ranks of child actors from It who’ve been in multiple SK properties: Chosen Jacobs (Castle Rock), Owen Teague (The Stand), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (Firestarter), and Nicholas Hamilton (The Dark Tower). Netflix’s fourth King original, following 2017’s Gerald’s Game and 1922, and 2019’s In the Tall Grass. Blumhouse did its first King feature this year with Firestarter, and is developing 2021’s Later as a limited series and a Christine remake from Bryan Fuller.

6. Set in Uncle Stevie’s fictional town of Harlow (ditto Revival), neighboring Under the Dome’s Chester’s Mill. The story references nearby Castle Rock, Motton, and Gates Falls, as well as Shawshank State Prison.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Tomatometer’s at 46 percent with a 54 audience score. A lot of favorable takes on Twitter though, and it climbed to the No. 2 spot on Netflix’s top 10 movies. The Guardian found that as “a horror-thriller, it’s woefully ineffective and curiously underexplained and as a drama about adolescence, it’s too thinly etched for us to care.” RogerEbert.com said it “needed a viciousness that Hancock eschews in favor of blunt commentary about dependence on technology,” while the A.V. Club wondered why it “becomes bafflingly intent on wrapping things up with a trite, predictable conclusion instead of letting things be messy and dynamic.” IndieWire characterized it as a “downcast and thoroughly dreadful supernatural drama that somehow fails to mine even a moment of fun out of a cautionary tale premised on the idea that your smartphone might literally be a portal to hell,” pointing out how “no movie has ever been so focused on the early iOS aesthetic, or so determined to get it right.” John Serba wrote on Decider that Harrigan’s “draws us into its gloomy reality and ‘rewards’ us with a maudlin exercise in coming-of-age tropes, sinister supernatural vaguenesses and a flat-on-the-nose anti-tech screed,” and that “King and Hancock are fishing around in the dark for a metaphor and coming up empty-handed; they never fully flesh out the idea that new-school tech is an old-school demon.” CNN has a tremendously positive review if you want something different.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR “MR. HARRIGAN’S PHONE” (2020): Kicks off If It Bleeds, King’s fourth collection of four novellas, a format he’s utilized about once per decade, in Different Seasons (1982), Four Past Midnight (1990), and Full Dark, No Stars (2010). Harrigan’s marks nine adaptations from those books, and two more Bleeds tales are in development—Rat from Ben Stiller and The Life of Chuck from Darren Aronofsky. Book preceded in 2019 by The Institute, followed in ’21 by Later and Billy Summers. 
Zach Dionne writes and records Stephen King things regularly at SKzd on Patreon.