Ethan Hawke bites the barrel: a review of the horror film "Black Phone"
One of this year's best horror films: "Sinister" director Scott Derrickson's adaptation of Joe Hill's short story.
Stephen King's son Joe Hill has long established an independent reputation from his father in the literary world and the adjoining edges of film adaptations. Remaining the spiritual and ideological heir to the King of Horrors, Hill has found a personal tone and built his own universe of fear. "Black Phone," one of his most titled stories, fell into the hands of Scott Derrekson, a director known for the first "Dr. Strange" but beloved by fans of the genre for "Sinister." The auteur alliance happened for a lot of love: "Black Phone" is one of Blumhouse Studios' (the forge of "Astral" and "Judgment Nights") most thoughtful and cohesive projects in recent years.
Late '70s. Anxiety enveloped the one-story town, where every pole "adorns" the announcement: "Missing Child." The locals, swallowing a lump in their throats, squint at each other and the new name in bold print, but continue to pretend that life goes on. Brother and sister, Finney (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), go to school collecting blows from local bullies, and at home the beatings of their alcoholic father. Domestic violence is the climate of every day that can end in disappearance: no black eye that turns blue compares with the grip of the Grabber, which Finn is doomed to experience on his wrist.
"Black Phone" offers a stroll through familiar territory, where every nook and cranny seems familiar: the tapes in class, the school toilets as the main arena of showdowns, the arcade after school, and the rocket launch in the backyard. But the memory artifacts that fill the screen are marked not by bright patches of nostalgia, as "Very Stranger Things" commands, but by warning signs of imminent danger. The same America that the pop culture of the 1920s misses so much is a no-holds-barred zone.
Genre master Scott Derrickson does not reproduce the feeling of a nightmare, but rather constructs a constant anxiety, a feeling that sucks under the spoon every evening phone call - the voice on the phone ready to tell you that your best friend has not come home. As is always the case with adult indifference, the miracle of salvation ends up in the hands of children: Gwen sees scraps of her classmates' executions in her dreams, and Finney, trapped in an ill-fated basement, receives calls from kids who couldn't escape - youngsters so eager to help, they're willing to reach out from the other side. Derrickson's mystique is not a genre convention, but a form of tragedy and a tool of empathy: if only the paperboy could talk.
The comparison with "It" is inevitable both plot-wise and stylistically: as a child, Hill was afraid of both his father's book and the TV movie Tommy Lee Wallace and the real serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and therefore in the story the Kidnapper was a clown. In the adaptation, however, Derrickson and his regular fellow screenwriter S. Robert Cargill turned Dr. Strange, a previous item of general filmography, inside out by changing the profession of the maniac. The magician yesterday was a hero, but today the magician has become the worst enemy.
But what matters is not that the circus is a den of joy alone, but the angle of view chosen. The main promoter of "Telephone" is Ethan Hawke in a satanic mask with horns: a kind of avatar of the nightmare that lives in every basement that is locked. But unlike the same Andy Muscetti (the Ono dileology), Derickson does not revel in the antagonist, does not poeticize violence, and does not place the maniac on the altar of the pop-cultural sacralization of evil. Ethan Hawke's face is hidden under a mask, and there are no flashbacks of the kidnapper's backstory or outlines of death rituals strewn across the screen. The viewer sees the killer through the optics of a frightened child, and the timing for uncovering motivation and admiring the intricacies of the inflamed brain is gifted to the maniac's victims.
The shift in focus makes you cry, rather than dread, every otherworldly call while watching it. The dead children don't remember themselves, becoming just another number on the list of victims, a statistic number, a line of accusation in the report card, and the headline in the morning paper. Finn calls each boy by name, molding the individuality of the dead from scraps of memory - one grief of an entire city divided into many little tragedies in one-story houses. The reverent treatment of the dead completely changes the matter of the frame, taking the film away from similar tapes.
If you wish, "Black Phone" can be recommended as a successful retro-framed genre film. Bicycles, talk of Bruce Lee and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," a notable cameo by James Ranson (Eddie from "Ono 2"): Derrickson's successful scary chronicle montage and unnatural body curves in the precepts of "Sinister," and Ethan Hawke at one point becomes a loathsome bad guy. But it's worth taking a step back and looking at the domestic landscape of the late '70s as a whole, and it's chilling to see the indifference and haplessness of those who will never grow older.
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