Young stars shine in dark horror
The Black Phone (R16, 103 mins) Directed by Scott Derrickson Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
We are in Colorado, 1978. At school, 13-year-old Finney Shaw is a nice enough kid. He has a home life straight out of a bad film and he is being bullied by the usual gang of tough kids. But Finney has a few chops of his own. He is not afraid to fight back and he has made a friend of the toughest kid in school, who seems to mostly have his back.
But best of all, Finney has a terrific relationship with his sister Gwen. And Gwen – as at least one kid always does in American teen horror movies – has some sort of psychic ability to dream of terrors that are about to become real.
Writer Joe Hill is the eldest son of Stephen King. And although Hill follows his own muse and is not imitating the old man in any way – Hill kept his identity secret until his first novel was a success – it’s also fair to say the apple hasn’t dropped too far from the tree.
The Black Phone is definitely King territory. There is a child abductor haunting the neighbourhood. And it is no spoiler at all to say that Finney will be taken by this man – and that Gwen’s psychic powers might just come in handy as he tries to escape.
If you have seen the trailer – or just looked at the poster – you might also have deduced that there’s an old phone on the wall, in the basement in which Finney is being held. And that phone might just be some sort of hotline to the afterlife. So, as they say in the movies, ‘‘who ya gonna call?’’
On the page, The Black Phone is an unexciting idea. The plot is such an uncomplicated thing, the baddies and the goodies are so lacking in nuance and the resolution relies so much on the flogged out trope of ‘‘dead people helped me’’ that it reads like a lazy parody of a – very minor – Stephen King yarn.
Director and co-writer Scott Derrickson made his debut with the pretty good The Exorcism of Emily Rose. His next film was the inexplicably daft The Day The Earth Stood Still remake.
But then Derrickson met writer C Robert Cargill and the pair teamed up for the terrific Sinister, which did everything you could want a low-budget, bad-tempered horror movie to do.
The Black Phone isn’t quite as good a film as Sinister. But it is efficiently made, occasionally jump-worthy and mostly gets across the screen like it has somewhere to be and knows how to get there.
Ethan Hawke dials in a cartoonish, but effective fiend. But the stars here are Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw (Ant-Man and the Wasp) as Finney and Gwen. These two sell the brother-sister dynamic and give The Black Phone just enough resonance to make it a more effective film than the outline could have yielded.
The Black Phone does everything the trailer promises, a bit better than I was expecting.
After advance screenings in select cinemas this weekend, The Black Phone will go nationwide from Thursday.