Ethan Hawke is one of my favourite actors working today. While he certainly has the skill to back up that kind of acclaim, my love for the guy’s work comes mainly out of how insanely eclectic he is. The Northman, Cut Throat City, The Truth, Stockholm, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, The Magnificent Seven, Predestination, Boyhood; not only is the man up for pretty much anything a director could possibly throw at him, but he’s also willing to go into unexpected international corners to spread the love around. So when news hit of him being cast as the villain in a horror flick, hell yeah, I was on board for that… but while Hawke certainly delivered, it’s a testament to just how good this film is that he ends up being at the lower end of this film’s positives.
Don’t get me wrong, as the sadistic and eerily enigmatic Grabber, Hawke delivers with a serious skin-crawler of a performance, but this might have one of the strongest casts of child actors I’ve ever covered on this blog, and possibly ever seen beyond that. Mason Thames as Finney, the Grabber’s latest kidnappee, works well with the dialogue but the sheer emotionality and dread he portrays just through his movements and expressions is genuinely impressive.
And yet, he gets bowled right over by Madeleine McGraw as his psychic little sister Gwen, who not only chews straight through her dialogue like a veteran, but is introduced with a fight scene that gives major Hit-Girl vibes. I am not even remotely kidding, this kid kicks arse, and if David Leitch has any openings in a future film for a little badass, she’d be my first endorsement. And considering how good Miguel Cazarez Mora is in this as Robin, a friend of Finney’s, her standing out this much is that much more of an accomplishment.
The fact that these kids are this good in their roles makes the overall story hit that much harder, as the script (adapted from a short story by Joe ‘son of Stephen King’ Hill) fits right into an It-esque tone with how it treats the kids in opposition to the adults. It admittedly doesn’t go as hard into All Adults Are Bastards territory, but between the Grabber, and Finney and Gwen’s absolute shitlord of a father, the theme still shows through. Only here, it’s slightly tweaked to show that these kids, on a day-to-day basis, need each other to survive. Whether it’s dealing with adults, or just warding off bullies among their own ranks, it approaches the notion of kids solving the problems in this town through a less directly-adversarial perspective. Basically, rather than needing to work together because the adults are the enemy, it’s more implied that they need to work together because they work best with each other.
From that foundation, director Scott Derrickson goes all-in with retro ‘70s aesthetics, from the autumn colour palette, to the delightfully foul-mouthed dialogue, to the old-school threat of stranger danger that the Grabber represents. The way he and DOP Brett Jutkiewicz visualize a lot of the more supernatural ideas here, like Gwen’s film-grain-splattered visions or Finney’s conversations through the titular Black Phone, are very cool to watch, and show that they had a concrete idea of how to bring the original short story to the screen. Just from the high concept premise (child, kidnapped and trapped in a basement, communicates with the dead through a telephone), it’s like seeing the images in someone’s head while they were reading the short story. I admittedly haven’t read it myself, but an adaptation should make the prospect of going back to the source material sound like a good idea, and this certainly does that.
The atmosphere of this thing is off the charts as well. While I’d argue that it could more accurately be described as a thriller than a straight-up horror film, the scenes of Finney in that basement are so stuffy with tension that I got quite a few Room vibes. This has some of the best sound design of any horror film of the last several years, and that’s mainly because it goes in the exact opposite direction of all the ‘music video horror’ shit I keep railing against. Rather than having the music (and editing) dictate the scares, they are instead used here as the backdrop for what’s going on, while the claustrophobic framing, Thames’ performance, and the voices of a number of other quite capable child actors, push Finney along his personal growth arc. When the greatest threats to his life and wellbeing are all too terrestrial (I did mention that his father is a fucking monster, right?), it’s the otherworldly that gives him the hope he needed.
Considering the last time I saw Scott Derrickson take on a horror film, it was with the aggressively stupid Deliver Us From Evil, I am quite relieved and gratified that this new one works as well as it does. It’s the right kind of Stephen King throwback, where the writers (both of the source material and this adapted script) truly get the deeper points behind his more kid-centric stories, which is then supercharged by a lot of visual flair and creativity, a sharp script with solid dialogue without spelling out everything going on, and a cast that manages to outshine Ethan Hawke delivering one of his creepiest turns to date.
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