Black Phone (2021)

There's someone abducting kids from a Denver suburb in the late '70s, and eventually the unlucky victim is Finney (Mason Thames), who wakes up in a cement block of a basement, confronted by a guy in weird masks (the lower half of which he periodically changes so it shows a different expression each time we see him.)

While the police flail about ineffectually, and Finney's sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) tries to find him via her dreams without their alcoholic dad finding out she's doing so, Finney starts receiving calls via the black phone on the wall of his cell. A disconnected phone, the calls from The Grabber's previous victims. Each of the kids has some bit of advice to offer from their own time there. Ways they tried to escape, or things they learned. Like an unlocked door being a trap.

The movie uses their fading memories as a way to build tension. One kid knows his bike lock is on the screen door at the front of the house and he wrote the digits involved down, but not the actual numbers. They were important to him, but since he was a quiet kid with no friends, Finney doesn't know what numbers would be important. I thought the movie might play with the question of whether Finney could trust what the kids were telling him, maybe have an earlier victim be one of his bullies, but it doesn't go that route. Tension enough in Finney trying to MacGuyver an escape from what they give him.

Plus, he has no idea how much time is passing or what sort of schedule the Grabber's visits are on. He's observant enough to realize there's some complicating factor, but any time when he's trying to rig an escape, there was a terror The Grabber would show up and find him digging through the floor or bashing out part of a wall and who knows how things go then.

The movie doesn't go directly into Finney's abduction. Takes the time to establish his and Gwen's lives. That Finney has a crush on a girl (which Gwen playfully taunts him about), that he gets bullied, that both of them live on tiptoes at home because of their dad. Gwen's adopted the approach of being loud and aggressive. When she's questioned by the police because she mentioned something in her dream to one of the victim's sisters, she eventually starts sarcastically admitting she abducted a kid twice her size, then calls the cops "fucking fart knockers," which was hilarious. When her father beats her over this (not hilarious), she grabs his bottle of vodka and smashes it on the kitchen floor. Which gets her beat harder, but was still an impressive move. She can't win, but she can still resist.

Finney takes the opposite approach. Head down, eyes averted, run if you can. But Thames gives him this intense stare and stance. You can almost feel him vibrating with anger during the scene where his sister's being hit. I kept expecting him to fly across the kitchen and try to tackle his dad or clock him with the toaster or something. He doesn't, but you see it again sometimes with The Grabber, so I was waiting for when it finally bursts free. And it was extremely gratifying.