Pick Up "The Black Phone"

I appreciate that "The Black Phone" is a very specific, very personal piece of horror.  It takes place in the midwestern America suburbia of the late 1970s, a more dangerous era for kids.  Our protagonists are a pair of siblings, 13 year-old Finney (Mason Thames) and his slightly younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw).  Their father, played by Jeremy Davies, is an abusive alcoholic and Finney is regularly targeted by local bullies.  So things are already bad for these two before a serial child-killer, The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), comes into their lives.    

Based on a short story by Joe Hill, "The Black Phone" is working with some very familiar parts and pieces.  The most obvious are the Stephen King media starring kids, especially "IT," but also all the nostalgic throwbacks to various '70s and '80s horror that we've seen lately.  "The Black Phone" wants to make the point that actually living through this time was a lot rougher than "Stranger Things" would have you believe.  Kids had more freedom, but there were also  far fewer safeguards.  Arguably the most upsetting scenes in "The Black Phone" are the early ones, where Gwen is beaten by her father, and where Finney is attacked by bullies.  Gwen's a spitfire who won't hesitate to curse out cops or tackle a boy twice her size, but Finney needs to toughen up.  And when he's targeted by the Grabber, this becomes a matter of life or death.

This premise may sound overly glum, but "The Black Phone" is designed to be a crowd pleaser, and an efficient delivery system for setups and payoffs that are very satisfying to see play out.  However, it also demands more from its audience than most.  The Grabber is a great new movie monster, and the great part is that we know very little about him.  "The Black Phone" has ghosts and prophetic dreams and this psycho killer who likes to dress in freaky costumes and play freaky games, and we're never given the rules for how any of it works.  The audience has to actively try and connect the dots themselves.  I suspect the horror literate, who are more familiar with these concepts, will enjoy the film more than the casual viewers for this reason.  If you need the Grabber to have a backstory and an explanation for his particular strand of psychopathy, I'm sure there will be a sequel coming along in a few years, but I like that writer/director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill let the mystery be for this first outing.  

The scale of the movie stays limited to the experiences of Finny and Gwen, which keeps it appropriately kid-sized.  This is a Blumhouse production from the guys who made "Sinister," so the budget is small, but "The Black Phone" doesn't cut corners, and occasionally delivers some pretty gorgeous horror imagery.  There's a lot of attention paid to getting the little period details right, and both of the main child actors are given the space to give full, nuanced performances.  The movie rests almost entirely on their shoulders, and while there are the occasional awkward moments toward the beginning, they deliver when it counts.  There's so much inherent suspense and drama that comes with scenarios of kids in realistic peril, it would have been easy to do too much.  Thankfully, the filmmakers picked the right kids for the job and trusted them.    

I haven't said much about the plot, because it's best to go in with as little information as possible.  I'll just say that there's not much original here, and the trailer gives away enough that a sharp viewer could probably  guess how everything plays out just from that.  However, the old tropes and ideas are executed with great skill, by people who clearly care about the material.  I'm not remotely surprised that Derrickson based a lot of the film's vision of suburban hell on his own childhood, and I'm sure everyone involved grew up on traumatic Stephen King movies.  There's some potent nostalgia at work, and not the pleasant kind, and that's a nice change of pace, honestly.  This feels like one of those films that doesn't come along often anymore - an R-rated film that is unambiguously mature and horrific, while still genuinely being about kids and childhood. 

  

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