Sinister things
THE BLACK PHONE
Michael O’Sullivan I The Washington Post Trailer ► youtu.be/nQWAVkx8O74
File The Black Phone under ghost stories, but not the kind you might expect.
Given the horror-movie résumé of filmmaker Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil), what you’d expect is a touch of the supernatural — subcategory: malevolent. And believe me, you’ll get some phantasms here. But the boogeyman in this 1978-set, fiendishly shivery thriller — which Derrickson directed and co-wrote, with C. Robert Cargill, from a short story by Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King — is 100 percent flesh and blood. And the poltergeist activity? Well, a preview audience erupted in applause (yes, applause) at the contributions of this stylish, thoroughly satisfying B-movie’s spectral supporting cast.
The bad guy here is known simply as the Grabber, a child-snatching psychopath of the sort found in urban legend and, unfortunately, on the front pages of newspapers. He drives a black van filled with black balloons, calls himself a part-time magician, and entices young boys into chatting with him on the sidewalk with the offer of a magic trick — before knocking them out with some sort of aerosol spray and spiriting them away. As the movie gets underway, he’s been in business for a while. There are posters of missing children all over this Denver suburb, and everyone knows their names.
But the real magic trick is what Derrickson does with the source material. The Black Phone — which centers on the Grabber’s latest victim, middle-schooler Finney Blake (Mason Thames), and his efforts to escape — makes us believe in the inexplicable. To wit: that Finney, while imprisoned in a soundproof bunker beneath the Grabber’s home, somehow discovers a rip, of sorts, in the veil between this world and the spirit realm, via a broken telephone whose severed wires should, at least according to the laws of electricity, not produce a dial tone. Whom Finney communicates with, and what he learns from them, are the pleasures slowly parceled out by this puzzle film.
Of course, the Grabber makes for a suitable foil to Finney’s ingenuity. As played by Ethan Hawke, who collaborated with Derrickson before in Sinister, he’s a perfectly prosaic monster. His intentions for Finney and his previous victims are plainly nauseating, though the film wisely doesn’t dwell on the clinical details or the underlying pathology. It’s an icky premise at best, and Hawke, whose full face is almost always hidden, doesn’t really need the variety of terrifying masks he wears, which make him look like the dad-bod version of a carved demon. He’s scary enough all by himself.
This isn’t exactly Room, the multi-Oscar-nominated 2015 thriller that won Brie Larson an Academy Award for best actress as the victim of a similar kidnapping. Nor is it a take on the friendly-ghost theme of Casper, although there are parallels. It’s its own thing — and that includes a backdrop of family trauma, in which Finney’s younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) possesses clairvoyant abilities of a special sort. They’re a legacy of the children’s late mother, whose precognitive dreaming led her to a tragic end. As a result, Finney and Gwen’s father is an abusive drunk, but that minor storyline — unlike a similar one in the equally excellent horror film Antlers — is a narrative dead end.
The Black Phone nicely evokes its era in a way that, unlike Stranger Things, never feels showy. This film belongs to Thames and McGraw, who ground it in authenticity.
There’s nothing unheard of here: a bad guy, a haunted house, a hero. But it’s what The Black Phone does with those simple parts that sparks a spooky connection.
Horror, rated R, 102 minutes, Regal Santa Fe Place 6, Regal Stadium 14, Violet Crown, 3 chiles