The Black Phone: Film Review
We got a taste of Ethan Hawke playing a villain in TV series Moon Knight recently and now he’s taking it up a notch by playing a serial killer in Scott Derrickson‘s The Black Phone.
The supernatural horror is set in North Denver in 1978. Five schoolchildren have gone missing and the kidnapper – nicknamed The Grabber (Hawke) – is still at large. His next victim is Finney (Mason Thames), who is held captive in a basement with nothing but a bed, toilet and a black phone on the wall. Despite being disconnected, the phone rings and The Grabber’s past victims are on the line, trying to help Finney defeat his captor once and for all.
I felt so odd to see Hawke as such a psycho! He’s really playing against type and I love it when actors do that as it’s immediately disconcerting. We don’t really see The Grabber an awful lot and never with his whole face exposed – he wears a variety of creepy masks. Hawke’s performance is suitably menacing but the masks do a lot of the work for him. I would have liked more backstory (or any detail at all!) about The Grabber but I guess the mystery helped make him scarier.
The film has a few jump scares and some chilling supernatural elements but I didn’t find it very scary and I can’t imagine any horror fans will either. A lot of the scary bits are in the trailer so you know they’re coming. It might not be the scariest horror but it is an effective thriller. I liked the concept and the story and I thought it was (mostly) well-written but I expected more to happen in the third act. It just needed more of a wallop at the end.
Thames does a fairly decent job as Finney, but my favourite child star here was Madeleine McGraw as his onscreen sister Gwen; she was fantastic. I loved her cheekiness and her line delivery and she made me laugh the most. Plus, she contributed to the story in a far more substantial way than I was expecting.
The Black Phone isn’t an effective horror but it’s still a strong thriller with a chilling performance from Hawke.
In cinemas Wednesday 22nd June