Rebecca Zinn

My friend and I recently went to see The Black Phone in theatres because they had heard from mutuals that the movie was good. While watching the movie I felt like I was enjoying myself, but the ending and what the movie left out ruined the entire experience. The movie follows a young boy, Finny, who was bullied and school and had an abusive father at home who gets kidnapped by “The Grabber” (very creative name) who locks Finny in a basement. In this eerie basement is a disconnected black telephone, and previous victims of The Grabber call the phone and give Finny cryptic clues to help him escape. I admit, the concept of the movie sounds like it has a lot of potential, but here’s where the movie really fell off for me: Firstly, the scary parts of the movie were just cheap jumpscares. The Grabber wears a scary mask and the ghosts of the previous children pop up at some points, but the story and characters were so underdeveloped that the movie wasn’t a good kind of scary, just the cheap kind. On the topic of the underdeveloped character’s- the killer, who had a lot of screen time, never had a revealed motive. The resolve at the end was that Finny wasn’t being bullied anymore and his abusive alcoholic father who beat up his younger sister says he’s sorry for being a bad father… which had no build up and wasn’t really forgivable. Finny also had a younger sister who somehow had medium powers from Jesus and her deceased mother which was never explained. Detectives used her dreams and visions to solve the case when Finny was missing and she would just pray to Jesus for her medium power to work which was, again, never explained. My last big criticism is that the movie felt like evangelical propaganda. The only motive The Grabber ever mentioned was that he liked “naughty boys” and all of his victims were young boys. The Grabber is depicted as a flamboyant magician who kidnaps young boys. As I mentioned, the younger sister, who the detectives used to solve the case, prays to Jesus for her powers, making both Jesus and Finny the saviors of the story. It felt like a poor message especially during these times where LGBTQ people are being heavily targeted by the US government. The entire ride home my friend and I couldn’t get over how incredibly disappointed we were in the movie.