Ethan Hawke’s makes a collect call to heaven.

The Black Phone is yet another movie I’ve been waiting to see for a while now, and yet haven’t with no real reason why. I like Ethan Hawke, I don’t know who the director is, and the writer is C. Robert Cargill. There was really never any reason for me not to watch this movie, and yet I haven’t until coming across it on the Starz listing on Amazon Prime video. So I watched it and it was great.

Directed by Scott Derrickson who looks like he’d play Tony Stark’s dorky cousin in Iron Man, The Black Phone is kinda like if you took the story of Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 and removed the animatronics. It takes place in 1978 in a small town where a serial killer named The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) is kidnapping kids and probably murdering them. It is 1978, so it’s also completely possible he’s also kidnapping the kids and forcing them to take part in a CIA acid experiment. But for the sake of the film let’s assume it’s murder.

Finney Blake (Mason Thames) lives with his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) with their dad Terrance (Jeremy Davies) who like all dads in 70’s-based films is an alcoholic who beats the shit out of his kids often times just to remind them that he can and it’s legal in 70s America. We get a bit of character building with Finney where we find out that he’s heavily bullied in school, and then there’s some violence with the kids. On his way home from school Finney gets grabbed by The Grabber and locked in a basement.

You know, his time in that basement was probably the longest he’s gone without someone kicking the crap out of him both in his home and outside of it. Just saying, silver linings. In the basement he finds a rotary phone that Hawke tells him doesn’t work, only it does and Finney starts getting phone calls from the dead kids that The Grabber had previously killed. The kids tell him secrets about the room to help him try to escape and that sets up the plot.

Of course this is a movie so Ethan Hawke’s plans are more complicated than simply that the dude is bananas cray cray. We have after all established that ghosts and spirits do exist and can communicate through rotary phones. Meanwhile Gwen discovers she may have the answer to saving Finney, that being that she’s been having eerily realistic dreams that also keep coming true, and they’re all related to the killer. Are the dreams real? Is it related to her mother? Was an $8 bottle of vodka really that expensive back in 1978?

The kids are great actors and Ethan Hawke is of course fantastic as always. I can tell when he’s enjoying the role like in this versus when he’s kinda phoning it in. Hawke says the he only has a few more movies left in him, which I expect means he’s going to retire around the same time Nicolas Cage does. Let’s hope both of them get into crippling tax debts and need to keep making movies forever.

The worst thing I can say about The Black Phone is that it feels like it’s going nowhere for a lot of the film and then suddenly sprints at the ending. It’s cool seeing the dead kids talking to Finney through the phone while also being projected into the room somehow, not sure how that works in the context of the film but it’s a neat effect. At 103 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and there’s plenty of little bits and pieces for the internet to theorize over how the world works.

I really hope they don’t actually get that sequel made, because I have the feeling it will try to explain the world and how it works and will just ruin the mystery. There isn’t a lot of horror in this film, it’s a lot of talking.

Rating: A-