A disconnected phone on a basement wall keeps ringing anyway, and each call may be the only thing standing between a trapped teenager and never coming home.
What is The Black Phone about?
Set in a quiet suburban neighborhood where children have been vanishing one by one, The Black Phone follows Finney, a soft-spoken teenager who is taken and locked in a soundproofed basement by a masked abductor known around town only as the Grabber. The room holds nothing but a mattress, a drain, and an old rotary phone bolted to the wall -- disconnected, according to the man holding him, yet it rings anyway. On the other end are voices that should not still be reachable, each offering a fragment of knowledge from inside that same basement, pieced together from what came before Finney. Outside, his younger sister Gwen chases her own unsettling flashes of insight, refusing to accept that the adults searching for answers are looking in the right places. Adapted from a short story by bestselling author Joe Hill, the film builds its dread out of a very ordinary setting -- backyards, school hallways, a phone that shouldn't work -- rather than anything overtly supernatural, letting the horror stay close to the texture of an actual childhood.
About the cast
Mason Thames carries the film as Finney, playing a kid whose quiet, watchful nature becomes both his vulnerability and his tool for survival. Madeleine McGraw is a standout as his sister Gwen, giving the character a stubborn, fearless energy that drives much of the story outside the basement. Ethan Hawke, mostly hidden behind a fractured mask for long stretches, brings an unsettling, soft-spoken menace to the role of the abductor, while Jeremy Davies and James Ransone round out the surrounding cast of neighbors and investigators.
Context & significance
The Black Phone is adapted from a short story by Joe Hill, a bestselling author whose horror fiction has repeatedly made the jump to film and television. Director Scott Derrickson, known for grounding horror in domestic, everyday spaces rather than elaborate mythology, brings that same restraint here, favoring a lived-in 1970s suburb over stylized scares.
Watching The Black Phone on Ktime
The Black Phone streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, letting Farsi-speaking viewers choose either the dubbed version or the original English with Farsi text. Watching only requires a free K-Time account login, and this page can be read in full without signing in first.