Reviewed: The Black Phone

"I have an announcement to make. One of our students, Finney Blake, was abducted."

I don't think The Black Phone fits neatly into the genre of horror as it's promotion suggests. It's creepy and has a few horror tropes within it but the plot is more like a thriller and there's plenty of elements of a coming of age comedy about it too, albeit an especially twisted one. 

In the 1970s in suburban Denver, children are going missing, abducted and murdered by the serial killer known only as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke). Shy but clever thirteen-year-old Finney (Mason Thomas) becomes the sixth abductee and is trapped in a sound-proofed basement with a disconnected black phone. When the phone starts ringing, Finney finds himself talking to the deceased victims who advise him on how to escape the Grabber. Meanwhile his sister Gwen (Madeline McGraw) has premonitions in her dreams and tries to use them to find Finney.

I really liked the premise here. Finney is stuck in a basement knowing that sooner or later the Grabber will murder him and only the voices of the other victims can help him. Said conversations with the dead are done in a really creepy way and are really the main horror element of the film. It almost has the feel of a particularly realistic escape room with a lethal consequence of time running out. 

The most creepy thing about the film is the Grabber. Ethan Hawke is utterly brilliant in the role, being weirdly likeable other than the whole abducting and killing kids thing. I like that we find out next to nothing about the character, not his name nor his motivation in killing kids, because it just makes him all the more disturbing. Throughout the film the Grabber wears a mask, regularly changing it and swapping between a full mask, just the mouth or just the eyes.  This too is never explained and is a fascinating part of the character that I'm still struggling to interpret. 

I thought the characterisation in this film was utterly fantastic. It would have been easy to make the ghosts pretty personality-less but no, the film finds times to give them backstories and they feel like real people. It's Finney though who is most fascinating, bullied at school and with an alcoholic for a father and a deceased mother, he's likeable and bright but trod upon by pretty much everyone. The setup work brilliantly and once the main story gets going as a viewer you really want him to survive and hope he develops as the film goes on. 

I love that the film has a sense of humour too, almost feeling like a comedy in it's first section and the Grabber in particular being lots of fun. It was fun watching this in a packed cinema and enjoying the film elicit responses from fear to tension to laugh-out-loud comedy- I've seen few films which can elicit so much reaction and so varied in a British cinema. 

I suspect some viewers are going to see this and be disappointed that it's not an out-and-out horror film but I thought it was fantastic. A brilliant script, brilliant direction and brilliant performances from both Hawke and newcomer Mason Thames. I had no expectations and utterly loved the film.