scary movie
«The Black Phone»: Ethan Hawke as a gloomy man with a mask
Mason Thames as Finney Shaw in a scene from The Black Phone. Photo: -/Universal Pictures/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The mystery horror film goes back to a short story by US author Joe Hill, son of horror grandmaster Stephen King. Actor Ethan Hawke stars in The Grabber.
Ethan Hawke is undoubtedly one of the most talented actors in contemporary American cinema. And it probably didn’t harm him and his career that he was never able or wanted to play his way into the very front row of stars like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt.
The mime, who was born in Texas, has long since had countless unforgettable appearances anchored in film history: Hawke was great as a student in the “Dead Poets Society” (1989), in “Gattaca”, as a careless father in Richard Linklater’s wonderful “Boyhood” from 2014. In the gloomy “First Reformed” by the great Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver”), Hawke even slipped into a priest’s robe.
Child kidnapper and serial killer
Although the American has also been seen in “Sinister”, a 2012 horror piece, and in “The Purge”, the 51-year-old hasn’t really dabbled in the horror area so far. At least the trailer for the new “The Black Phone” now suggests that Hawke also felt comfortable in the role of a mask-wearing dark man.
Hawke is a child kidnapper and serial killer named “The Grabber”. It’s 1978 and five children are already missing in a suburb of Colorado. The teenager and baseball pitcher Finney Shaw also has to deal with “The Grabber”, who lures him, knocks him unconscious and throws him into his van. Finally, Finney wakes up in a soundproof basement with a wonderfully ancient-looking phone that is switched off: but this one is able to transmit the voices of the previous victims of the “Grabber” (in German: “Der Greifer”).
Any new call could help Finney. Meanwhile, his sister experiences psychic dreams. The mystery horror film goes back to a short story by US author Joe Hill, son of horror grandmaster Stephen King. Scott Derrickson directed it – also no stranger to horror, think of films like “Deliver Us From Evil” or “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”.
– The Black Phone, USA 2021, 103 min, FSK 16+, by Scott Derrickson, with Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw.