The literary horror family are getting all the film adaptations this year! First, Joe Hill’s short story, The Black Phone, gets an awesome Ethan Hawke led masterpiece, and now Stephen King’s Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is getting a similar treatment?! Count me in! Admittedly, the latter had a rather quiet release on Netflix just a couple of weeks ago, but I enjoyed it just the same.
Honestly, a lot of that obviously has to do with King’s storytelling, but it also has to do with the fact that I find Jaeden Martell endlessly watchable! Metal Lords was one of my favorite films this year, so I’m not too surprised that I liked this adaptation so much. It also helps that the supporting cast was equally fantastic. Donald Sutherland?! Winning, for sure. Although, clearly The Little Things‘ director, John Lee Hancock, has no trouble landing stars. The story is a fairly simple one, and the film does an excellent job mirroring the text. A part of me wishes that either one of them had a slightly higher body count, but I suppose that wasn’t the whole purpose of the story.
In it, Craig is young when he’s recruited by a retired and reclusive billionaire to start reading to him several times a week. The two formed a special bond, almost a strange friendship, that Craig grew to both love and fear in equal measure. Being that it was the early 2000s, the first iPhone hit the scene, which Craig grew to love, and eventually, so did Mr. Harrigan. As happens with old age, one day Craig finds Mr. Harrigan has passed away, and at the last minute, Craig tucks his phone into his jacket pocket before they bury him. After that time, Craig faces trouble from a bully at school, and after one particularly bad interaction, he calls Harrigan’s phone wishing for a kind of retaliation on the bully. The next day, that kid winds up dead.
Nothing is too bloody, and Craig doesn’t end up on some vicious revenge bender, having Harrigan kills loads of people from the grave. He only uses this special gift on one other occasion, which in my mind, seems just. I think that perhaps the goal of this story was to portray the potential lasting effects of regret. I think that’s ultimately why Craig decided to get rid of the original iPhone in the end. I also love how much current technology tidbits King added to the story. He had the fortune of writing this short story in 2020 well after all of those things have happened in real life, though I’m sure there were some like Harrigan back then with the foresight of all that was to come with the introduction of the cell phone.
Overall, I was slightly disappointed with the lack of horror, but I did enjoy how faithfully the film adapted the text. This is probably a film I’d re-visit in the future only because I watched it on a tablet on vacation. I feel it deserves more attention on a bigger screen. As for the short story, I’ll likely reads the others that are a part of the If It Bleeds collection, as those stories have also been optioned for the big and small screen!