It is not common to see Ethan Hawkewho was the elegant guy The society of the poet of death and was the eternal lover of the saga of Before sunrise (Will there be a fourth film with Julie Delpy? Seems not) as a serial killer, who kidnaps children or teenagers and does terrible things to them.

Hawke, whom we have come to see from evil Knight of the Moonthe Marvel series on Disney +, is The Raptor, the guy who around 1978, in Denver, drives a black truck, with the writing Abracadabra painted on the side, and when he gets on his victims he wears a wizard hat and releases black balloons.

No, it’s not Buffalo Bill (the killer of The silence of the lambs), with which the black phone It has some points in common, but the construction of the character and the environment in which he moves or lives – he houses the helpless kids in a soundproofed cellar – well, it is reminiscent of the classic with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster.

Hawke’s masks – better to say the character, so as not to generate the strangeness than the actor’s interpretation childhood Y Training day it has many shades, why not, it’s not like that – the ones she wears to hide her face are really terrifying. She sometimes she seems to smile, other times, well, no.

But the film’s protagonist is Finney (Mason Thames), a long-haired preteen who, of course, is eventually kidnapped by The Kidnapper. There are posters on trees and poles in the city with photos of missing children. And Gwen, Finney’s sister, has premonitions, visions or whatever, which is what makes the movie great.

The phone in the title is one of those old artifacts, common in the 1970s, where you had to dial a fork with numbers, which hangs in the basement of El Raptor, which is black, which is hung and has …. the thread cut.

Well, as much as The Raptor says it doesn’t work, it does. And Finney takes care of him. And he talks to … We won’t ruin anything.

More suspense than terror

the black phone, more than a horror film, it is full of suspense. He throws jokes, not on the phone, but on possible escapes for Finney, because the film is also that, how the protagonist can get out of that not entirely dark environment, with a dirty mattress and to which the Raptor comes down to bring him scrambled eggs.

We have said that it is more suspense than terror, because the only leaps that can be made in the audience are due to those abrupt cuts in the image and with a screeching sound, an almost older resource than cinema.

The film is based on a short story by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son, so he remembers it to us too ElementWell, it won’t be a simple coincidence.

Hawke, which he had already worked on Left (2012), another horror and suspense director Scott Derrickson, who directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2012) and the first of Strange Doctor (2016) for Marvel-, fulfills its role. We had never seen him as a bad boy, we usually empathize with him and this generates a certain ambiguous relationship.

Mason Thomas had never acted in a movie before – Derrickson had hardly ever made him rehearse or interact with Hawke, to make him more nervous about acting – he seems like a consummate actor.

In short, the film mixes terror, suspense, fantasy and the inexplicable, a combination that usually pays off well. But don’t ask the black phone too much logic, because everything is not possible.

“The black phone”

Good

Terror. United States, 2021. Original title: “Black phone“. 103 ‘, SAM 16R. Of: Scott Derickson. Starring: Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies. Cinemas: Hoyts Abasto, Cinemark Puerto Madero, Cinépolis Recoleta and Avellaneda.