Review: The Black Phone starring Ethan Hawke is a chilling and well-crafted horror

Despite a well-known lead bad-guy with Ethan Hawke playing a scary child-snatcher, The Black Phone is a modest little horror film, low in budget and low on pretensions, and delivering economical but effective chills.

Burying the lede, the film's producers could make a lot more of the film's origins - a short story from author Joe Hill, son of the master horror author Stephen King.

Knowing this going into the screening, there is so much to unpack in terms of thematic influences passed from father to son, and in terms of the producers wanting to subtly exploit that connection.

In the suburbs of Denver in the 1970s - we know it is 1974 because one of the local teens impresses his friends by recounting dialogue from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre he has just seen in the cinema - teenagers have been going missing. Telephone poles are peppered with Missing Person flyers.

The local teens have given the perpetrator the nickname of The Grabber, even though nothing is yet known about the culprit.

For Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), an abstract idea like a child-snatcher is the least of his worries when he has a violent alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies) at home, and between him and school each day are three needlessly mean bullies from his class, just waiting to give him a pounding.

Finney's sister Gwen (Madeline McGraw) has been having dreams about The Grabber, and the police have come calling, because Gwen has been sharing these dreams at school and they've heard this girl is sharing factual details about the missing children that the police haven't yet made public.

Finney and Gwen's mother may have had the Gift, and perhaps Gwen can see things, but she doesn't share enough about this man with her brother, because when the black van from Gwen's dreams that we have seen circling a number of scenes pulls up in front of Finney, he falls for The Grabber. He is abducted.

Waking up in an inescapable basement, Finney is told by The Grabber that he will not be hurt. Both Finney and we know this is a lie, and Finney does his best in the times he is left alone to work out how he might escape.

Giving Finney some hope, and a handful of clues, to possible escape is an old broken phone hanging on the basement wall. The device isn't plugged in, its wiring has been cut, and yet the phone occasionally rings, with the missing children on the other end of the line, sharing their stories with Finney and giving him clues to escape the room.

Meanwhile, his sister Gwen is doing everything she can to bring her psychic dreams back to find clues about her brother's location.

Ethan Hawke's killer is a terrifying figure. He wears a series of masks, each cover a part of his face, and the filmmakers leave us to draw our own conclusions about whether this is a studied pretension or whether the man has some multiple personality disorder or is something demonic.

A child killer and a child who may or may not find escape are, frankly, horror enough. The other-worldliness of the phone calls from the grave, and Finney's family psychic powers, add a series of enjoyable jump-scare moments, though weren't entirely necessary.

The filmmakers play with visual elements that tie in the Kings, father and son, including the yellow raincoat from It, though there are plenty of others for Stephen King fans.

I felt there were parallels in the story to the 2009 Gregg Araki film Mysterious Skin, which also featured a boy and a basement and had me seriously worried for where the story was taking Finney.

Hawke is having his possibly third career resurgence with this and his Disney series Moon Knight and he is believably terrifying, though it is the young performers of this film who hold the viewer.