An award-winning short story by Joe Hill (talented son of Stephen King) adapted by C. Robert Cargill and Scott Derrickson (team behind Sinister) with the latter directing (after he left the helm of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), it looked promising. After this first announcement, the poster appeared: close-up of Ethan Hawke’s face masked by a creation as spectacular as it is “uncomfortable” by makeup artist Tom Savini (who has worked with George Romero, among others): expectations have climbed.
At the arrival, The black phone (VF of The Black Phone), with its typically “Kingsian” atmosphere, fails to live up to expectations, but it does not crumble under their weight.
As for the clichés of the genre, the feature film takes place in the late 1970s (hello nostalgia) in a small American town (hi Stranger Things) where young people are kidnapped by an aficionado of inflatable balloons (hello It). In the foreground is Finney (Mason Thames), a bullied teenager (hello all precedents). On the fantasy side, his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has premonitory dreams. And on the sordid side, their father (Jeremy Davies) disciplines them with belts.
The action kicks off after the viewer has watched Finney in just enough scenes to develop empathy for him. The boy then gets kidnapped by the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) and ends up in a bare, soundproof basement. On the wall, the famous black telephone. Disconnected. But which sometimes rings, relaying the voices of the killer’s victims who want to help the prisoner escape.
The stage is thus set for this familiar, popular and prized horror that is the trademark of the production house Blumhouse (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, etc.). And it works. Except that…
The film could have scored more points if it hadn’t relied so much on visually beautiful and strong moments of tension, but leading to fairly predictable bursts. If he hadn’t turned so many corners. And if he had dug into his characters instead of relegating them to the rank of archetypes: you, you are a policeman and you investigate; you, you are the adorable comic relief and you make us laugh (even if Madeleine McGraw is great at it); you, you are the tormented but endearing protagonist (Mason Thames however hits the mark in this conventional but well-directed score).
Then, we seem to have forgotten that a work of this kind is successful if its villain is. But the guy behind the mask, frightening as he is, sees his visual impact disintegrate over the course of his appearances: we end up getting used to it and he’s just that, a bad guy behind a mask. Because we know him little, we do not know what is his driving force, his perversions; and it’s unclear what set in motion the devastating spiral he’s indulging in at (too) high speed — what spanned two years in the short story unfolds here in a matter of days. All this evil then seems to float in the void (like balloons) and, left to himself, Ethan Hawke fails to make real the Evil with a capital letter that inhabits the killer. Nor to terrify. Now, this is the idea of a horror film.