The Verdict
You took a Joe Hill short story, the kind of thing most people would adapt into a 20-minute segment, and you stretched it into a full feature without the seams showing too badly. That is the trick that breaks most adaptations, and you cleared it. The premise is lean: a kidnapped boy, a soundproof basement, and a disconnected phone that rings anyway. You trusted that to carry a movie, and the box office says you were right.
Ethan Hawke as the Grabber is the whole pitch, and you knew it. You gave one of cinema's most reliably warm faces a mask and a child-killer's calm, and the casting-against-type does the heavy lifting. The young leads, Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw, are not just there to be menaced; they hold the frame. McGraw in particular swears and bleeds and fights like a kid who has actually been to hell at home before she ever met you.
Where you wobble is in the connective tissue. A short story has the decency to stop before it has to explain itself, and a feature does not. The supernatural mechanics, the ghost-line ringing, the period-piece grime: it is all atmosphere doing the job that plot sometimes should. But a 2025 sequel got greenlit, so clearly enough people wanted to pick the phone back up. You built a brand out of dread and a rotary handset, and that is no small magic trick.
What it nails
- ▲Casting Ethan Hawke against type as the Grabber, weaponizing his usual warmth into menace behind a mask.
- ▲Two genuinely capable child performances from Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw that anchor the whole film.
- ▲Stretching a Joe Hill short story to feature length without the premise collapsing into filler.
- ▲A massive $161 million worldwide return on a roughly $18 million budget, a textbook Blumhouse win.
What it botches
- ▼The supernatural phone mechanics lean on atmosphere to paper over how thin the plot logic actually is.
- ▼Period-piece grime sometimes substitutes for genuine narrative texture rather than adding to it.
- ▼A short-story premise inevitably shows some stretch marks across a full runtime.
- ▼The villain's menace is so front-loaded that the back half occasionally coasts on goodwill alone.
Who it's for
You want grounded, period-set supernatural horror where the scares come from a great actor under a mask and two kids you actually root for.
Who should skip
You need your horror plot mechanics airtight and you have no patience for a ghost-phone premise you are asked to take on faith.
The whole story lives on the hub