Review: 'The Black Phone' is a lean, muscular and highly efficient horror movie, with strong work by Ethan Hawke and two young performers

A horror-thriller that works with terrifying efficiency, “The Black Phone” is a return to form for director Scott Derrickson, who reunites with two of his key collaborators on his 2012 fright-fest “Sinister”: His writing partner, C. Robert Cargill, and his star, Ethan Hawke.

Derrickson doesn’t show Hawke’s face too much in “The Black Phone,” putting him in a face-hugging mask that looks like a whitewashed version of Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Hawke’s character is called The Grabber, a serial kidnapper and killer of boys in a Colorado town in the mid-1970s.

At first, The Grabber appears as a dark figure in the distance, as we meet his next potential victim. That’s Finney (played by Mason Thames), a Little League pitcher who’s small but has a cannon for an arm. He’s often picked on by the bullies in his school, but has a defender in Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), who learned his fighting skills from Bruce Lee movies. Finney’s other champion is his little sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose most formidable weapon is her foul mouth.

Finney and Gwen share some secrets at home. For starters, their dad (Jeremy Davies) is an alcoholic and abusive — especially when Gwen shows signs of her gift: Dreaming about things that haven’t happened yet, in chilling detail. That’s why the cops are curious when they hear Gwen talking about The Grabber and mentioning that she’s dreamed about black balloons, a crime-scene detail the police haven’t shared with the public.

It isn’t long, after some of Finney’s friends disappear, that Finney himself is kidnapped by The Grabber. He wakes in a basement room with soundproofed walls, a bare bed on the floor, and an old black telephone on the wall. The phone, Finney discovers, is not connected to an outside line. So it’s unnerving, to both Finney and The Grabber, when the phone rings.

Derrickson (who started this film when he parted with Marvel for “creative differences” on “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”) and Cargill, adapting a Joe Hill short story, devise a script that moves like clockwork. Every detail dropped early in the film is a puzzle piece that comes into play in the third act, placed precisely for maximum impact.

Hawke is frighteningly charismatic as the methodical kidnapper, running through his deadly routine and slightly upset that it’s not going the way it usually does. But the breakout talents of “The Black Phone” are young Thames and McGraw, as the siblings who are bonded by the supernatural forces helping them, in different ways, to survive and solve the mystery.

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‘The Black Phone’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence, bloody images, language and some drug use. Running time: 102 minutes.