Review | The Black Phone movie review: Ethan Hawke plays a sadistic child murderer in Doctor Strange director’s effective horror thriller
- Ethan Hawke is superbly creepy as child murderer ‘The Grabber’ in this adaptation of a short story by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill
- Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw are also impressive as 13-year-old kidnap victim Finney Shaw and his younger sister Gwen
4/5 stars
Often the philosophical leading man, Ethan Hawke undergoes a remarkable transformation in The Black Phone, a thriller from writer C. Robert Cargill and director Scott Derrickson, with whom the actor collaborated on another horror film, Sinister, in 2012.
Hawke is skin-crawling as a vicious child murderer known only as “The Grabber”, who preys upon young boys in a sleepy town in the US state of Colorado in the late 1970s.
Adapted from a short story by American horror writer Joe Hill, the film weaves palpable real-world fears and spine-tingling supernatural chills into a deeply unsettling nightmare worthy of Hill’s father, Stephen King.
Inevitably, The Grabber’s ominous black van soon crosses Finney’s path and he finds himself a prisoner in a barren basement, with only a broken rotary telephone for company.