The Black Phone

North Denver, 1978. Kids have been vanishing — enough that the neighbourhood has a name for whoever is taking them. Finney Blake is thirteen, slight, and used to keeping his head down. He lives with his sister Gwen and their father, who drinks and hits. Gwen has been having dreams she can't control — vivid, specific, disturbing — that seem to show fragments of what's happening to the missing children. She's tried to tell the police. They're not interested.

Finney is grabbed on his way home, bundled into a black van, and wakes up in a basement. Concrete walls, a mattress, a filthy toilet, and a black telephone mounted on the wall. The phone is disconnected — its cord doesn't reach anything. It rings anyway. The first voice that comes through belongs to one of the boys who was taken before him.

The dead kids call one by one across the film. Each one leaves Finney something: the layout of the basement, a loose tile under the mattress, a length of buried cable, a strategy for the Grabber's patterns and moods. They couldn't get out. They are making sure Finney can. The Grabber himself moves between personas — a strange, dissociative performance behind rotating masks — and it's never entirely clear how much he knows about what the phone is doing.

Gwen's dreams sharpen. She starts seeing details that point toward the Grabber's house — a specific address, a yard, a fence. She pushes until the police have to take her seriously. They find their way there just as Finney reaches his.

Finney uses everything the dead boys left him: the cable, the sand, the tile, the knowledge of when and how to move. He fights the Grabber and wins. He gets out. Gwen is there when he does. The dead kids on the phone said he would make it. They were right.