The Black Phone

It's not groundbreaking, but it's very well done.

Ethan Hawke continues his spectacular mid-career run in a rare villainous role.

The young actors rise above their material, but Hawke is wasted as the killer.

Much of this feels contrived to distract us from what the film ultimately appears to be about.

The atmospheric and unnerving horror movie doesn’t just have literal scares, it effectively taps into our primal fears about menacing predators in all forms.

Derrickson is restrained with his jump scares and succinct with world-building. The Black Phone subverts any number of Spielbergian tropes — not to mention voguish nostalgia — with a grimy, bad-old-days version of the past.

This is True Detective meets Stephen King; missing kids with a hint of the supernatural – but it goes nowhere.

The Black Phone might not be consistently terrifying, but it has its moments. Ultimately, it is let down by an undercooked, patchy script and odd stylistic and editing choices that remove well-built tension.

In The Black Telephone some of the director's stylems are observed, such as the prominence of children/adolescents in the action, perverse villains who hide their faces behind peculiar masks, and the presence of pagan or religious elements.

The Black Phone isn’t just the best film Scott Derrickson has made thus far… it’s a larger testament to the kind of humanity and imagination that can come out of modern horror.