Review: The Black Phone

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

The quality of horror movies has been impressively high in recent years - while there remain a number of bad ones, many of the good ones have been especially rich - and this year has already seen two very strong 1970s-set horror pictures - Ti West's gleefully deranged "X" and Scott Derrickson's haunting "The Black Phone."

Based on a short story by Joe Hill - the son of Stephen King - the film is rich on 1970s period detail without being overbearing about it. There's a great opening sequence depicting a baseball game, and there are numerous scenes of youths in scraps that capture the skinned knees and fist fights prevalent among young boys. There are, of course, a few great needle drops - Edgar Winter Group, Sweet and a great use of Pink Floyd's "On the Run" - and references to "Emergency!" and "The Tingler." But the film's sinisterness is just lurking around the corner from the nostalgia. 

In the picture, young Finney (Mason Thames) - whose "mint arm" will be put to good use by the end of the film - is a shy baseball player in a suburb of Denver in 1978. He has a close friendship with his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who possibly displays some psychic powers that you might expect in a Stephen King story, and they live with their alcoholic and occasionally abusive father (Jeremy Davies), whom they take turns "taking care of" when he's had too much to drink.

In the early scenes of the film, several young boys - two of whom Finney knows well - go missing, and the nightly news warns denizens of the burb of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), a man who shows up at the scene carrying a bouquet of black balloons and wearing facial makeup. After he has dragged the boys into a van, he keeps them locked in a soundproofed basement in a home he shares with his brother - who is somehow clueless about it all. He pays visits to his victims donning a creepy mask, and taunts and punishes them before eventually killing them.

Finney becomes The Grabber's latest victim, but the twist is that the ghosts of The Grabber's previous victims call Finney on a black phone - which has a cut cord - that hangs on a wall in the basement room where he is kept. Each of the boys provides a piece of the puzzle to Finney in an attempt to aid his escape,  but it's ultimately the advice of a tough Latino kid (Miguel Cazarez Mora) with whom Finney is friends at school that is most important: Although he doesn't stand up for himself against the bullies at school who torment him, he'll one day have to do so.

For a movie in which much of the action is set in a basement, "The Black Phone" is fairly suspenseful, if not exactly scary. Hawke does a solid job of playing against type, and although we don't learn enough about his character in terms of a back story, he makes his scenes count with a sinister performance of the type I've never seen him portray before.

Both Thames and McGraw are also particularly good, and the latter's confessionals to Jesus - particularly one in which she gets a little frustrated - provided some much needed levity to this dark story. "The Black Phone" may be short on scares, but it's long on mood, features some solid performances, does a great job of capturing its era and makes you care about its characters. 

Derrickson is previously responsible for the pretty scary "Sinister," and similar to that film what makes some of his horror movies so effective is the level of detail and aura he creates for his spooky stories. "The Black Phone" is one of the genre's better offerings as of late.