You can’t just take it and not film the fresh King. This tireless king of literary horror proves to be a steady purveyor of plots for filmmakers, and now, the film adaptation of one of his four stories included in the 2020 If It Bleeds collection has not been long in coming and is already available on Netflix. In this review, we tell you whether it is worth the attention of the audience.

“Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” / Mr. Harrigan’s Phone

Genre mystical thriller

Directed by John Lee Hancock

Cast : Donald Sutherland, Jayden Martell, Joe Tippett, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Cyrus Arnold

Netflix Premiere

Release year 2022

IMDb site 

This story begins in 2003. Modest schoolboy Craig lives with his dad in the average American wilderness called Harlow, of course, located in the glorious state of Maine. In addition to school, the boy attends the local church and expressively reads Bible messages to believers. Once there comes Mr. Harrigan – an old and clearly tired of life billionaire, who decided to hide from the hardships of existence in a loud metropolis.

This rather frail looking man offers Craig and his father a little job for the kid, which consists mostly of reading aloud to Harrigan from classic world literature three times a week. For these easy chores, the guy will receive five bucks an hour and postcards with lottery tickets for the holidays.

Several years pass, the rosy-cheeked boy turns into a slightly gloomy, pale teenager, and his relationship with a wealthy, unsociable pensioner becomes somewhat friendly. While Steve Jobs is trying to take over the planet with his new miracle gadget, Craig begs his father for an iPhone and gives Mr. Harrigan the same one, because one of the latter’s lottery tickets turns out to be winning.

The grouchy grandfather is at first skeptical about the newfangled toy, but when he finds out that this little thing with a bitten apple on the case is able to provide the most up-to-date information, he changes his mind. But then a sad day comes, because the main character finds his mentor dead, and later, at the funeral, for some reason he puts the same donated iPhone into the inner pocket of the deceased’s jacket. The guy could not even imagine what this rash act would lead to.

If someone could think that this work by John Lee Hancock somehow belongs to the horror genre, because Blumhouse was still involved in the production (along with Ryan Murphy as a producer), then this is not at all the case. Rather, the story is a mystical thriller, seasoned with a pinch of teenage psychological drama about growing up. As in the original source, the narration is conducted from the personality of the young Craig and follows the original text quite accurately, changing only minor points.

But if King no-no, but sometimes allowed himself small jokes, then Hancock offers a completely monotonous, gloomy tone of narration, which was often used in the mystical horror of the zero, when the main action of the tape unfolds. However, all this looks as if he had no intention of somehow intriguing. This is an authentic autumnal, sad movie, yet refusing to offer any surprises, especially to those viewers who have an idea of the original work.

When a buried dead man’s phone starts answering messages from a grieving Craig, and his high school bully, a healthy bull named Kenny Yankovic, dies in a mysterious accident, these mystical elements can’t be seriously scary or even disturbing. This happens because, firstly, a viewer who is familiar with the cemetery-otherworldly, including King theme, is unlikely to be able to find something new here, and, secondly, the supernatural motif looks too light, minimalistic, then is something that is somewhere on the periphery of the plot.

It is much more interesting to observe the behavior of the protagonist when he faces an important moral choice, but this line cannot cause honest empathy either. Not because the young actor Jayden Martell, who showed himself well in the adaptation of “It” by the same King, does something wrong, but because his character does not receive an interesting development or at least something more than one and a half emotions. The more qualitative against the background of Jayden looks almost episodic Donald Sutherland – at his venerable 87-year-old age, the master feels great in the frame.

Harrigan’s Phone is an unremarkable otherworldly thriller that claims to reflect on the impact of information on society in the modern digital age, dependence on them, as well as the loss of a loved one and the attempt to come to terms with this loss. Perhaps a better-adapted author would have been better able to bring this “non-terrifying” work of the King of Horrors to the screen, but John Lee Hancock produced just another mediocre film that would soon be simply lost in the streaming giant’s endless information stream.