The Black Phone

Director: Scott Derrickson
Starring: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Davies, E. Roger Mitchell, James Ransone, Miguel Cazarez Mora
Distributor: Universal Pictures International
Runtime: 103 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes: Strong themes, violence and coarse language

A 13-year-old boy is abducted by a menacing kidnapper, ‘The Grabber’, and confined to a basement. The audience is invited to share his terror, and then a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring.

There is an ugly masked face in the promotion for The Black Phone. It looks like a horror film. But, it is more of a terror film than a horror film. Horror as we understand it today suggests blood and gore, impossible, beyond this world situations. Terror, on the other hand, has situations that we can identify with, not such an emphasis on physical violence (though there can be some of that as here) but, rather, on the psychological.

Director, Scott Derrickson has made a number of interesting films over the decades, sometimes with religious implications (he studied theology at university): Exorcism of Emily Rose, the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sinister and the exorcism film, Deliver us from Evil. The setting for this film is Denver, 1978, focusing on a 13-year-old boy (which was where Derrickson himself was at that time). So, this is principally a story about children, their game and game rivalries, classes, bullying, and harsh lives at home. Several children have been abducted and have disappeared, with the villain nicknamed by the media The Grabber.

The focus here is on the boy, Finney (Thames), not yet able to stand up for himself against the bullies at school or the brutal treatment at home by his father (Davies). However, he is strongly supported by his younger sister, Gwen (strong screen presence by McGraw). But here is where something mysterious happens. While Gwen prays to Jesus for the children to be found (and when she is upset with Jesus she gives him quite a crass tongue lashing), she also has dreams about the children, about the abduction, visionary and fearful dreams. The police interrogate Gwen to her father’s anger.

And then Finney is abducted and, at last we see The Grabber, mainly with his monstrous mask, an ogre, and confining Finney to a harsh basement. So, the audience has to share in his terror, as the 13-year-old tries to deal with The Grabber (Hawke), a character with no redeemable qualities.

And the black phone? It is in the basement, disconnected, but rings, some crackling, some silence, some voices – the voices of the children previously abducted, communicating with Finney, making suggestions to help him escape, and the film using the device of them appearing visually on screen though unseen by Finney. Which adds, of course, to the eerie atmosphere.

Gwen continues to dream, alerts the police, and the possibilities for saving Finney. But Finney has learned from his ghostly visitors, especially a boy who had saved him from the bullies in the past, who urges Finney to stand up for himself against The Grabber.

The eerie thing about terror of films is that we can identify more readily with the victims than we do in horror films.