Here is The Black Phone Review, an American supernatural horror film that is dark, effective, and thrilling look at childhood and violence. Does it worth to be watched? Let’s find out.
The Black Phone Movie Review
The Black Phone is directed by Scott Derrickson and written by him and C. Robert Cargill, based on a short story of the 2004 short story of the same name by Joe Hill.
After being abducted by a child killer and locked in a soundproof basement, a 13-year-old boy starts receiving calls on a disconnected phone from the killer’s previous victims.
I love Scott Derrickson’s horror films. Movies like Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I think he makes really good horror films for adults that are very smart that have limited jump scares.
And when there are jump scares, they’re really strong and they’re rarely ever false scares. And The Black Phone was something I was very excited to see.
Sinister is one of my favorite horror movies, period. And I think Emily Rose is extremely underrated and so walking into the black Phone, this movie had a lot to prove. And I like it more than both of those films. I think it’s a better movie than Sinister.
This movie has so much going for it in every way. And it’s also a production that I imagine wasn’t exactly easy to shoot. It’s majority child actors.
The casting process is always extremely important, but even more so when you know that the quality of your film is going to hinge on the ability of a child actor. And everyone in this movie is really good, in particular Mason Thames, who plays Finney, and Madeleine McGraw, who plays his sister Gwen.
And I’m not going to get too Into the plot, because I honestly didn’t know anything about the movie except for Ethan Hawke plays a child killer. And that was enough to get me in the theater, of course. Plus the talent who made the film.
The film has so much going for it. The 1970s setting, for instance. There’s a lot of fun Easter eggs of old TV shows and movies and things like that. And I think it would have been easy to depict this era as very innocent.
And Ethan Hawke’s character known as the Grabber, being this one thing that’s just destroying all this innocence. But everyone in the movie is going through some shit.
Kids at school pummel, other kids bloody. There are fights and constantly abusive parents. It’s not depicted with rose-colored glasses. And I really like that, this movie is dark and it goes places that surprise me and that genuinely unsettled me.
Ethan Hawke is amazing. He’s so good. It’s been a long time since there’s been a new masked killer of some kind in a film that had any impact on me whatsoever. But the grabber is awesome.
And I love what they did with the masks.
There’s changing in masks constantly. That sort of suit his mood at various times. And I thought that was brilliant. Real characters, they don’t feel like stock characters. The scares feel real and it’s not just like constant jump scares every ten minutes.
It’s situational horror, it’s terror. You feel like bad things are happening to people that you care about. And there’s a handful of jump scares that work very well.
One in particular, that really got me gave me a really good jolt. But you’re scared because of excellent sound design, a musical score by Mark Coven, who is amazing, and the fact that you really want this kid to escape.
And there are stakes built up around how many kids you know did not escape. And every time that phone rings and you think he might get a new clue of how we could escape. You want him to do it and you’re caring about him along the way.
Without getting too much into the plot because I didn’t know this going in, there is a character in the movie who has dreams that are integral to the story, and the way they shot those dreams was sort of to look like an old film, and it really felt like sinister to me. It felt like connective tissue to that movie, and I thought it worked really well.
But they do some really cool things with those dreams, connecting them to reality towards the third act of the movie that I imagine was very difficult to accomplish on the page and make feel natural.
You guys should really check out the Black Phone. It’s very good. And as far as short stories adapted into features, I think it’s one of the best. I loved everything about it. The audience I saw it with was cheering at various moments. And while that sometimes can be annoying.
If you’re feeling it and you feel like the movie deserves that kind of reaction, there isn’t quite anything like experiencing that in the theater. So in this case, it really worked for me because I was on the ride that this movie gave me.
Guys, thank you so much for reading The Black Phone Review. See you next time.
