Is the much-hyped The Black Phone out of order, or did the filmmakers dial up a masterpiece? Please leave your funnier, more coherent phone puns in the comments.
We have entered into a golden age of horror-themed content centered around children in the pre-cell phone era. Largely off the back of Stranger Things’ massive popularity, “kids on bikes” movies and tv shows have started proliferating the market. They are characterized by pre-teens and teens pedaling around and solving some sort of mystery, often of a supernatural nature, back in the 70’s and 80’s when parents had much looser expectations for knowing where their children were at any given time, and certainly lacked the technology to reliably track them down. That element is probably played up a bit for plot convenience, but any child of that time period recognizes a lot of truth in it. The fascinating thing about this sub-genre is that most of the recent entertainment of this ilk is really high quality. Usually when a hot new property inspires a rash of imitators, you end up with a fair amount of sub-par material. I don’t know if the prospect of directing an ensemble of children has scared away all but the most capable filmmakers, but for whatever reason this trend has not seen the typical slew of crummy imitators. The Black Phone follows suit as a highly enjoyable entry into the child endangerment genre.
The story revolves around a pair of siblings, Finney and Gwen, who live with their father, an abusive, alcoholic widower. The pair have a rough home life and it isn’t much better at school, where fights and confrontations with bullies are a daily occurrence. To make things unfathomably worse, Finney ends up the latest victim of “The Grabber”, a kidnapper and serial killer who has been snatching up young boys for his own nefarious purposes. Gwen, who has some sort of precognitive abilities inherited from her mother, seeks to track Finney down before he is killed while Finney relies on a mysterious black phone to plan his escape. The titular black phone is not a functioning landline, but does give him the ability to have brief conversations with the boys who have already shared the fate he is hoping to avoid. Meanwhile, Ethan Hawke’s Grabber is playing out a psychotic game with Finney that only he knows the rules to, and that can ultimately only end in Finney’s suffering and death. It is all very engaging and tense, although it stops well short of scary. I actually appreciate that to some extent, as centering a movie around a child abductor who tortures and kills his victims could have led to a deeply unpleasant experience. The Black Phone isn’t too interested in the specifics of the Grabber’s depravity, preferring to spend its time with the excellent child actors who play Gwen and Finney. That approach pays off in a couple of ways. First, those kids just do a tremendous job. You could really make the argument that Gwen’s plotline does not impact the outcome of the story in any meaningful way, but that doesn’t really bother me too much because any excuse to spend time with the character is a good one. The second reason the film is better off centered around the protagonists is to avoid making the movie about the Grabber. Hawke turns in an inspired performance, and he looks cool with his series of modular masks, but the movie doesn’t work if the audience is invited to root for him in any way. I could easily envision a version of this story where Hawke is a badass who pads his kill count by taking out some cops or something and gets an extended backstory, and that would be a nice way to set up a franchise based around the character, but muddying those waters does not serve anyone well. Yes, horror cinema does have a sadistic child killer that turned into a fan-friendly mascot, but we don’t need another one of those and the tone of The Black Phone does not work if we find the villain to be anything other than reprehensible.
This was a movie that I quite enjoyed. It tackles what could have been a distasteful and exploitative subject matter with tact and intelligence. All of the central performances were very good, and I even think that non-horror fans might like this one, provided they are open to thrillers or maybe enjoy true crime content. A strong recommend from me to you, whoever you are.
Kommentare