THB #174: The Black Phone

I really didn’t know what to expect when I sat down in a theater to see The Black Phone. I knew that Ethan Hawke was going to be doing something interesting. I knew that this was the film Scott Derrickson ended up doing instead of Dr. Strange 2. I knew the trailer was creepy, so I was attending without my wife or kid.

We find out very quickly that The Grabber is driving around in a black van, grabbing kids. But mostly, we are hanging out with Finney, a 13-year-old with a quirky, but overtly smart sister, Gwen. Finney plays baseball. Finney goes to his boring school. Finney deals with his raging, dangerous father. Finney notices girls. The film feels like it is set in the year or two before Halloween… in the less monied suburbs… with cheap houses on plots of land 3x the size of the houses, cars on cinder blocks, and wide barely-trafficked streets. Finney and Gwen’s world is all in range of a bicycle.

Gwen’s world is wider than her brother’s or her father’s, in that she has some kind of p…