The Black Phone

Scott Derrickson has got the touch like few others. It's shot in exactly that unsettling thriller tone, plus it has top-notch sound design. Narratively, it's maddeningly unbelievable (from the kid fights to the phone gags to the final showdown), but overall it holds together by the skin of its teeth in some weird way. It's not much, but for unpretentious one-time viewing it's doable. [60%] (2022-07-19)

The screenplay is an adaptation of a 20-page short story yet seems like it crammed in a four-pound novel. Lots of unrelated scenes, an unnecessary number of supporting characters, implausible interactions and relationships, and most importantly, the whole thing is totally littered with plot holes. Scott Derrickson boasts that unlike other directors, for him a test audience is not an annoying obstacle but a creative collaborator, and this film looks it. (2022-10-15)

He's a bad boy, that Ethan, but let's be honest, without his meaty glam rocker, this would hardly be a slightly scarier episode of a cartoon. There are a couple of ideas in there, but they are not the most polished I’ve ever seen. Derrickson surprises us a bit through the fluctuation of tone, and the goofball elements are really out of place. Overall, I wasn’t really blown away by it. Deliver Us From Evil may have been corny as hell, but it had a dense atmosphere. This film oscillates between a cute Stranger Things ballad and a feeble genre hybrid. I am not going to give him any credit next time. (2022-07-19)

For a film that was supposed to be one of the highlights of this year's horror season, The Black Phone is terribly basic. There's really nothing extra beyond what the synopsis says and what the trailer showed. I kept hoping that Derrickson and Hill held some sort of ace up their sleeve, but alas. It's well made, it has quality actors and likeable characters, a creepy bad guy, but what's the point when it's more period atmospheric than scary, the rules of how the supernatural works float in a vacuum, the finale lasts about a minute, and the only minor plot surprise elicits raised eyebrows rather than appreciative shock at the screenwriter's abilities. A watchable genre film, but we should demand more from Scott Derrickson's cinematic horror. (2022-07-21)

Scott Derrickson is a decent craftsman, and his films always look good. But in The Black Phone, he tries to combine the thriller-style theme of a kidnapper (reality) with a ghost story (fantasy) in a rather more mechanical than creative way, and it doesn’t really work. The ghost-story elements serve only to hinder the plot development. The bad guy is insufficiently scary and underdeveloped. We don’t even find out what his motive is. The dramatic storyline with the weak, violent father is not given enough space. The “someday you will have to stand up for yourself” motif has drive, but it's aimed only at a teen audience. The most stable pillar of the film is young Mason Thames in the lead role. This won’t be the last we’ve heard of him. (2022-09-09)