Array
I absolutely love Ethan Hawke. No, I can’t tell you exactly why. Is it because I wish he was my flawed father figure or my intellectually stimulating one-night stand? The Black Phone, a 2022 horror-thriller now streaming on Prime Video, relieves me of this choice by turning the Gen-X heartthrob into an unambiguously odious villain. And I’m into it.
Mix Stranger Things with It, toss in your favorite serial killer miniseries and add a dash of bitters to temper the nostalgia, and you’ve got The Black Phone. If you still haven’t seen this little gem of a mid-budget genre film — yes, you — you should.
Hawke plays fictional ’70s serial killer The Grabber, a „part-time magician“ who never leaves home without his trusty bundle of pitch black balloons and can of aerosol chloroform. And he often returns home with a kidnapped pre-teen boy to lock in his murder basement — but not before donning one of his grotesque horned masks. (While the likes of Ted Bundy and even Richard Ramirez have inspired inexplicable lusty fandoms, I guarantee The Grabber’s mask will rob you of your crush on Ethan Hawke, at least for the film’s 103-minute run time.)
The protagonist of the film, mercifully not the serial killer at its center, is Finney Blake (Mason Thames), a young teen who lives with his alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies) and smart-mouthed little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) in the blue collar, perpetual stick season Denver suburbs of the late ’70s. The adults here are absentee at best, abusive at worst. And the kids bloody each other’s noses as much out of rage as to claw their way up a delicate, lawless hierarchy. It’s a bully or be bullied world, marbled with child-led anarchy. On top of all that, boys from the town keep turning up missing, and Gwen’s begun having psychic visions about them.
