103 min | R | June 24, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A boy gets snatched off a Denver street by a child killer and wakes up in a soundproof basement. The only thing in the room is a disconnected black phone on the wall. It rings anyway, and the voices on the line are the killer’s previous victims.
Finney Blake is a thirteen-year-old kid in 1978 suburban Denver who gets bullied at school and beaten at home. A masked man called the Grabber is abducting boys around the neighborhood. Finney becomes the next one taken, locked in a bare basement with a black rotary phone that does not work. The phone rings, and the dead boys on the other end coach him toward escape. The film is less about the kidnapping than about a powerless kid learning to fight back, and it threads that coming-of-age spine through a horror premise without letting either half go slack.
Mason Thames plays Finney as a boy who has been taught to absorb punishment rather than return it. He keeps his shoulders hunched and his voice small, and the performance tracks his slow recovery of nerve. Ethan Hawke plays the Grabber behind a series of interchangeable half-masks that hide his eyes or his mouth. He works almost entirely through posture and a soft, coaxing register, and the restraint makes the character worse than any leer would. Madeleine McGraw plays Finney’s little sister Gwen with a foul mouth and psychic dreams, and she steals every scene she gets. James Ransone turns a small role as a coke-addled would-be investigator into something twitchy and sad.
Scott Derrickson directs from a script he wrote with C. Robert Cargill, adapting a Joe Hill short story. The period craft is the strongest technical element. Derrickson shoots on grainy stock and intercuts Super 8 footage of the Grabber’s previous abductions, and the degraded image makes the violence feel like a recovered artifact rather than a staged scare. The basement is lit in sickly green and gray, and the camera stays low and tight to keep Finney’s eye level. The score by Mark Korven leans on dissonant texture instead of jump-scare stings, which keeps the dread continuous rather than spiked.
The film works best when it stays grounded in the specific cruelty of childhood. The bullies, the drunk father, the indifferent adults, and the killer all belong to the same world of kids left to fend for themselves. The supernatural phone calls are the weakest device because they hand Finney his solutions instead of making him find them. Derrickson keeps the runtime lean and the tension steady, and he resists the urge to over-explain the Grabber’s psychology. It is a sturdy, well-built genre piece that knows exactly what it is and does not overreach.