THE BLACK PHONE (2021) ★ ★ ★
Horror works best when ordinary situations turn horrifying. Think of "Jaws," where innocent swim meets killer fin, or "The Shining," where what should be a boring winter of checking boiler pressures and frozen pipes becomes a supernaturally murderous time-warp. When director Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill wrote "The Black Phone," they had the formula right by allowing the mundane day-to-day lives of two sibling school kids slide into the macabre. I thoroughly enjoyed how Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw portrayed Finney and Gwen, and Jeremy Davies was wonderful as Terrence, their alcoholic and abusive father. But as I watched, I couldn't stop thinking that there's a fundamental problem with how the film conveys its horror. It wasn't until days later that it clicked: the problem is the adaptation.
The screenplay is derived from a short story by the same name by Joe Hill (Joseph Hillström King, Stephen King's son). It's a faithful adaptation, with few deviations from the plot, which involves the kidnapping of a teenager by a mysterious psychopath the locals call The Grabber. In the first part of the film, we follow Finney's very ordinary life of going to school and coming home in a sleepy late-seventies Denver suburb, except Finney's ordinary is wallpapered by patterns of intrigue; he would be a victim of bullies, were it not for his pal Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), the school tough guy who repels all threats and pancakes faces with his bare fists, but he is the victim of his own father, who beats him and his sister with a belt in drunken fits of rage. There's a tactile rawness to how both worlds are portrayed, with a cringe-worthy moment of Robin serving a beating that goes from bloody nose, to bloody face, to just bloody (excessive, until you remember that pre-nineties schoolyard fights were like that).
That moment is counterweighted by one of Gwen's father beating her with a belt in the kitchen, after she fails to hold his vodka hostage to stave off his attack. The beating is hyper-realistic and terrifying to watch, thanks to McGraw's convincing portrayal of a mortified and teary-eyed child who would do or say anything to make her father stop hurting her. Gwen has prophetic dreams about a sinister man with a scary mask and black balloons, a fact that piques the interest of law enforcement when they interview her about the recent disappearances of her peers. Although they're skeptical at first, she eventually makes believers of them, but not before her hapless brother is abducted in real life by the man of her bad dreams. Finney finds himself locked in a filthy basement, with only a mattress, a rug, a toilet, and a disconnected black wall phone to remind him of the outside world. Oh, and also daily visits from The Grabber, played as menacingly as possible by Ethan Hawke in a very scary mask.
The story's hook is that the phone serves as a line between Finney and The Grabber's previous victims, who use it to call him from beyond the grave and give him clues to his escape. This is a terrific narrative device, but for me it was spoiled somewhat by everything that preceded it. I felt that Finney's life before The Grabber was far hairier than anything the creepy masked killer offered up. For example, the tenuous dynamic between Finney, his protector Robin, and the bullies changes after Robin is abducted -- suddenly the boy must fend for himself. Vulnerable and socially isolated, he finds little solace at home. And Gwen's scene with dear old dad is so terrifying that it would take a truly monstrous individual of unalloyed evil to top it, yet The Grabber's character never quite rises to this level. Terrance's motive for abusing his own children lurks somewhere at the bottom of a bottle, but The Grabber's Id is never elucidated. I perceived him as more a paper tiger than a vicious animal, and his unnerving visage seemed at odds with his perfunctory basement-prisoner deliveries of scrambled eggs and soda pop.
Stephen King's influence pervades this film, with visual cues that hint at his past hits. The Grabber's balloons and Gwen's yellow raincoat are throwbacks to "It," while Finney's basement visitations are reminiscent of "Sometimes They Come Back" and "Misery." I'm not sure if reminding audiences of older and better movies was the best idea, but at least it didn't detract from the story.
The tumultuous emotional challenge of facing real-world childhood dangers is a logical and skillfully-written backdrop for the The Grabber's surreal agenda in Hill's tale, and to the extent that this contrast is shown on screen, "The Black Phone" is a success. I only wish the film adaptation of Hill's story had better calibrated the impetus for its psycho's evils to match the unwaveringly scary banality of evil that is so effectively depicted in Finney and Gwen's ordinary everyday lives.
--- Bill Fontaine
