'Black Phone' is the new collaboration of director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill, with whom he previously worked on 'Sinister' and 'Doctor Strange', after his fright from Marvel and leaving 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness '. He now returns to the genre in which he excelled and tackles a terrifying subject. Based on a short story by Joe Hill, the film is about a Colorado neighborhood that has been paralyzed by a wave of kidnappings in the mid-1970s.
A boy named Finney (Mason Thames), whose kind heart makes him a target for school bullies, and his foul-mouthed younger sister (Madeleine McGraw), the family's feisty family in a depressing environment with an alcoholic father who loves them. strikes, they must face a terrible reality. Children have been going missing in their town for quite some time and the locals call the mysterious perpetrator The Captor (Ethan Hawke), and things get complicated when Finney becomes a victim of this child abductor.
Finney must find a way to get over his fear and break out of his basement prison, but he has unexpected help in a black phone in the same room, and even though he is offline he hears it ringing. A typical concept premise that turns into a perfect plot of limited elements, very much in the style of the latest Blumhouse hits but taken to another level here thanks to Derrickson's direction, a great 70's setting and an expansion of the kidnapper theme with various associated macabre imagery.
'Black Phone' plays it hard by trying to include sordid real life situations such as kidnappings, child abuse and other terrible events, but it is very effective despite the inclusion of supernatural elements. The amount of violence against children is shocking, and it becomes a general theme, whether it is domestic situations, absolutely brutal fights between them or graphic scenes that with adults. It seems that Derrickson incorporates many of his own experiences, memories and notes that seek to portray the tragic aspect of the portrait.
In Espinof The 23 best horror movies of 2021
This translates to a combination of different types of fear routes on screen without making one seem more important than another. Before Finney is kidnapped, 'Black Phone' builds a world set in 1978, which portrays a violent time where it has been assimilated that bullying is done face to face and problems are solved with fists. There the villain appears, a masked psychopath played by a surprising Hawke, capable of becoming a man as cowardly as he is terrifying and grim.
For the vast majority of the film, the actor wears a segmented devil mask designed by none other than the legendary Tom Savini, who in Hill's original 2004 short story The Grabber was a clown. Following the success of 'IT', Hill suggested updating that look and Derrickson came up with the idea of creating a three-piece mask through which the eyes could be seen in various changes and combinations.
An instant iconography to a killer that seems inspired by John Wayne Gacy, but avoids imitating the clown outfit of the same. The black balloons are borrowed from the movie 'Possum' and a lot of the imagery is heavily influenced by Stephen King's work, both his Derry Odyssey and 'The Shining' and other works. The second great element is Finney himself, the most important character who transmits his learning naturally, although the MVP of the film is Madeleine McGraw, who plays the younger sister stealing each scene in which she appears, with spontaneity and great grace.
In Espinof The 31 best horror movies of the decade (2010-2019)
Hill tends to write about family and if in his graphic novel 'Locke & Key', he explores a magical world that reveals secrets within an ancestral home and in 'NOS4A2' he builds a vampire dream world for children from broken homes, here he reinforces his idea of escape from a terrible reality through confrontation and the paranormal. Where the television adaptations of his two previous works were diluted, 'Black Phone' is capable of converting emotional catharsis at the right moment. It is by far the best adaptation of his work, just above the underrated 'In the tall grass'.
'Black Phone' is a great return to form for Derrickson, handling equally well the chilling idea of heinous crimes next to your house, in ways that completely erase movies like 'Summer of '84', and the archetypal supernatural tale, updating the idea of films like 'The Last Step' (1999) and other new classics of American urban horror, where Matheson's trail and King's trail rise with the unparalleled skill to representto lay out the macabre of a director who already has enough key works in the genre to be considered one of the greats of contemporary horror.
'Black Phone' opens in theaters throughout Spain on June 24 by Universal.
