Adapting a short story into a feature is hard. Short stories tend to be tight, concise bits of storytelling. They get in at exactly the moment they need to and get out. Novels have time to wander, things that can be cut and added in adaptation. But short stories? Sometimes you get someone who really understands the story’s core conceit. The additions feel natural. I’m thinking Arrival here. But most of the time, you get a tensionless slog of go-nowhere subplots. Most of the time, you get The Black Phone.
“It doesn’t work.”
A mysterious stranger torments a small suburban town in the 70s. Known only as ‘the Grabber’ (Ethan Hawke), this figure nabs children off the street. They’re never seen again.
Finney (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) are a pair of down-on-their-luck kids. Gwen is a feisty pre-teen tormented by dreams that come true. Finney is a sensitive, smart kid who is constantly picked on by brutal bullies. Even their home life is no escape, as their alcoholic father threatens and beats them regularly.
The family is torn even further asunder with Finney becomes the Grabber’s latest victim. Gwen tries to use her dreams to find him, while Finney tries to survive in the Grabber’s basement dungeon. All he has is a toilet, a mattress, and a mysterious, unplugged black phone that rings periodically. But when Finney starts answering the phone, he finds himself speaking with the spirits of other dead children, who want to help him escape the Grabber’s clutches.
“Not since I was a kid.”
You might notice something from that last paragraph: Gwen kind of disappears, huh? She’s not really relevant?
That’s because she’s… well, not at all relevant. The film adds her story to pad out the runtime. Now, this can work. The most affecting part of this story finds Gwen wrestling with her faith. How could Jesus let her brother be taken? Why can’t he help? Why, and here’s where her story goes off the rails, can’t Jesus send her a prophetic dream telling her exactly where her brother is?
It turns out he can send her a prophetic dream telling her almost where her brother is. Hilariously, Jesus gets lost repeatedly, sending Gwen and the police… across the street, for some reason. Well, okay, for ‘I wanted to visually reference a classic horror film’ reasons. Jesus is a Demme fan, it turns out. Nothing about this story matters, and nothing about it works. It’s just a device to add some spooky dream imagery and Christian nonsense.
Basically every supporting character suffers from this issue. The almost comically over-the-top father’s tortured drinking as he seeks to prevent his children from being psychic? Meaningless. The hilariously brutal bullying, which at two separate occasions appears to break down into a choreographed kung-fu fight? Meaningless. The Grabber’s coke-head brother doing a film-length Ace Ventura impression? Meaningless.
“I’ll scream. I’ll scratch your face.”
This leaves the core of the film: Finney and the Grabber. And this comes closest to working. Finney trapped in a dungeon, trying to jury-rig a way out while navigating a serial killer’s mind-games is, at times, surprisingly effective. But even there, the film undercuts itself.
See, the Black Phone is a device that lets the Grabber’s past victims call Finney and give him advice. Because Finney also has psychic powers, see? What was that? This makes Gwen an even more superfluous character? Ignore that.
This is where most of the film’s overt supernatural horror comes from, as teenage boys in slasher-victim-makeup tell Finney what to do. Each of them has their own ideas on how to survive and escape. Or do they? I couldn’t tell if they were giving him shitty, ill-conceived escape methods or if they were trying to help him craft a weird Home Alone-esque defense mechanism. Hard to say.
Either way, while the idea there is interesting, it also makes Finney a weirdly passive character. The film is basically a repeated cycle of scenes. Finney gets a call. A ghost gives him a task. Finney performs the task. But it doesn’t work! So the Grabber plays a mind game. And then we repeat. It’s a strangely tensionless way to tell a story. Finney is just a medium for other boys’ desire to escape, even as the film tries to posit this as something he needs to do to stop being bullied.
“This face?”
The Black Phone should be good. I have a lot of problems with Scott Derrickson’s Sinister, but at least it’s effectively scary. Ethan Hawke is excellent. Hell, most of the performers are quite good. And the movie looks pretty nice. Derrickson has a nice eye for horror aesthetics. He even opens up to pulling from directors I wouldn’t have expected, like Cronenberg.
But The Black Phone is a dull, tensionless slog. Sometimes a short story needs to remain a short story. The Black Phone is built around such an immediately captivating single image that I can see why Derrickson wanted to adapt it. It feels like it should be perfect for film. But it’s too slim for a mainstream horror film. Something slower, more willing to sit in the muck of the dungeon and Finney’s character, might have worked.
As it is, though, The Black Phone worked better on the page.