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In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2022, Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and David Sims—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.
Dear All,
Beatrice’s invitation to talk about a movie this year that felt genuinely different set me to thinking about an increasing rarity on the cinematic landscape: small movies that are not delicate arthouse flowers but sturdy genre shrubs, the kind of smart but modest mid-budget release that used to make up a significant portion of the films to be found at the local multiplex outside of awards season. This is the kind of movie you meant when you’d say, in the days before streaming and Covid made it a special event, “Let’s go see a movie”: not an installment in a mega-franchise or a Cannes-fêted masterpiece, but just a new film that was low-key funny, scary or suspenseful, and above all about something, possessed of its own idiosyncratic mood or look or voice.
Though it came out months ago, I have yet to shake the memory of The Black Phone, a scrappy little horror number with only one big-name actor: Ethan Hawke, who spent the whole of his fairly limited screen time with his famous face covered by a grinning, horned mask. That film, directed by the horror veteran Scott Derrickson, was based on a short story by Joe Hill (the son of Stephen King!), and it has the one-and-done compactness of good short fiction. Too short, maybe—The Black Phone could have used a story beat or two more at the back end, though it’s refreshing to leave a movie wanting more for a change. But the world into which Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill (also his co-writer on the Sinister movies) unassumingly drop the viewer is notable for the specificity of its bleakness. The main character, Finney Blake, a suburban middle-schooler superbly played by the then 14-year-old Mason Thames, has a lot on his mind even before he gets kidnapped and locked in what’s clearly a well-used murder basement. Finney and his little sister are already dealing with a chaotic, unsupervised 1970s childhood, a recently deceased mother, an abusive alcoholic father, and the looming threat of the Grabber, a local child-killer who’s become such a part of the kids’ daily lives they casually trade jokes and urban legends about him.
The Black Phone is not high-octane horror. The main critical rap against it was that it didn’t contain enough scares, and even as a relative lightweight viewer of the genre, I agree it could have ended with a bigger adrenaline rush to balance out its 103 taut minutes of spooky suspense. But the movie became a sleeper hit for a reason: It doesn’t feel like a cranked-out reproduction of other recently successful films of its kind. The prevailing style in horror (which has been used in some great movies, don’t get me wrong) is to have the scary element of the story—the murderer, the occult force, the monster—double as an allegory for some other, less imminently threatening, but still dire experience the protagonist is going through. (Think repressed maternal rage vis-a-vis The Babadook.)
In The Black Phone, nothing is an allegory for anything. The trauma of Finn’s and his sister’s crappy childhood simply exists in tandem with their completely legitimate fear of being kidnapped, killed and—it’s hinted if never made explicit—subjected to sexual abuse. As the movie ends, the problem of that specific murderer-on-the-loose has been solved, thanks not to the useless Denver cops but to Finn’s little sister’s psychic powers (an irresistible plot point to those of us in the key watched-Escape to Witch Mountain-twenty-times demographic). But the father who takes the youngsters back home at the end, for all his tearful pledges to change, is still a grieving alcoholic. Their mother is still dead. And they now have incontrovertible proof that, indeed, they do live in a world where their safety is low on the list of any adult’s concerns. That’s gritty stuff for a low-budget, high-margin Blumhouse joint that could have earned its keep just by providing a few well-paced cathartic scares.
In The Black Phone, nothing is an allegory for anything.
I was going to start this third round by digging into Tár (that sounds sticky), but David did it for me in his dispatch on that prickly enigma of a movie, which after two viewings is still unfolding in my brain. I’m with him on Tár being (maybe) the best movie of 2022, and also on his point that one of the best things about it was the keen sense of humor it displayed toward the self-sabotaging antics of its hubristic heroine. The pleasingly daft theory that the last hour or so of Tár is “all a dream”—well, not quite that, but at the very least an altered reality as experienced in Lydia Tár’s increasingly twisted mind—comes from Slate’s own Dan Kois, who is editing the Movie Club this year and who has been known in years past to drop in with a guest post, so maybe he’ll come set us stodgy literalists straight. In the meantime, for Bilge (or any one of you who wants to pick up this thread): Without diving too far into the fan-theory abyss, was there a movie this year that had you convinced that nearly everyone else talking about it was watching it wrong? If so, this is the place to take those hobby-horses out for their last ride of the year.
Giddy up,
Dana
Read the previous Movie Club entry | Read the next Movie Club entry
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