Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone is a supernatural horror film that takes a deceptively simple premise and turns it into a genuinely unsettling experience. Set in a quiet 1970s suburb, the story follows a community gripped by a string of child abductions — each boy disappearing without a trace, each case going cold. The tension builds steadily until the film’s protagonist, Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), becomes the killer’s next victim, shifting the narrative from a slow-burn dread into a claustrophobic survival story.
What makes this film stand apart from the crowded horror landscape isn’t its scares — it’s its character work. Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of “The Grabber” is the film’s true engine. He builds a villain of remarkable unpredictability: charming and childlike one moment, volatile and terrifying the next. Performing largely behind a mask, Hawke relies on body language and vocal shifts to do the heavy lifting, and it works. Mason Thames, as Finney, more than holds his own opposite a seasoned actor, delivering a grounded, emotionally rich performance that gives the film its emotional core.
The film’s central conceit — a disconnected telephone in Finney’s basement cell that allows him to communicate with the Grabber’s previous victims — is inventive and handled with restraint. Rather than leaning into cheap supernatural spectacle, Derrickson uses it to deepen the mystery and raise the stakes gradually.
That said, the film isn’t without its flaws. The horror elements and gore occasionally feel forced rather than earned, as if the film is trying to remind the audience it qualifies as a horror film rather than letting the atmosphere do the work naturally. Finney’s father, while thematically connected to the story’s larger ideas about cycles of abuse, doesn’t feel fully convincing as a character — he functions more as a narrative device than a fleshed-out person. And when it comes to the 2nd part- things change. That’s when I felt the real horror. The 2nd part entrusts most of it’s energy into supernatural elements and the climax felt splendid. The show stealer of the 2nd part for me was Madeleine McGraw. Yes, you guessed that right- the same Gwen from the Black phone( Sister of Finney).
Overall, The Black Phone is one of the more memorable horror watches in recent years — not because it reinvents the genre, but because it trusts its performances and takes its characters seriously. If you have any appetite for horror, this is worth your time.