The Black Phone
Just another Stranger Things ripoff: kids in violent situations (including swearing), nostalgia for the 70’s, there’s no third element. Ethan Hawke might have lost a bet with Jason Blum and was forced into this.
The kids themselves are fine, they have demo reel footage, but it’s all basically pointless. I was prepared to rant about the villain being a gay paedophile, and the hero’s journey being tamping down his gay tendencies, having all his male crushes killed, expose his toxic masculinity and getting some pussy, but the film doesn’t even go there, it’s left way too much in the air. I might be reading too much into the undeveloped subtext.
Blumhouse is several times spoke of in the same sentence as A24, but it’s not even comparable. This is just low budget schlock, not a low budget masterpiece like Hereditary.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.