Ignoring the expectations associated with the names of producers Ryan Murphy and Jason Blum, Mr Harrigan’s Phone — ostensibly a horror movie — is neither camp nor particularly scary. That it has the most preposterous premise of any film that Jaeden Martell — the star of The Book of Henry, one of the weirdest films of the decade — has appeared in should tell you exactly how strange it is.
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Mr Harrigan’s Phone is based on a short story by Stephen King, proving once again that Hollywood is willing to produce just about anything as long as it is convinced that the material is marketable. At this point, you could pitch (and eventually get the green light on) a thriller based on King’s grocery list.
This isn’t the first time that Netflix has paid to produce a film based on his work, but while each previous adaptation — Gerald’s Game, 1922, In the Tall Grass — had something going for it, Mr Harrigan’s Phone fails to recognise the inherent humour in the story of an old man who maintains a correspondence with a young boy from beyond the grave, and occasionally commits murders on his behalf.
Martell, who previously starred as Bill Denbrough in the It movies, plays the unremarkable teenager Craig, who is hired by the billionaire Mr Harrigan (played by Donald Sutherland) to read him novels because his vision is failing. Nothing creepy about this at all. Craig shows up at Mr Harrigan’s mansion (in Maine, of course) thrice a week, and proceeds to read him great literary works such as Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, and A Tale of Two Cities. This goes on for five years — Craig behaving like a human podcast and Mr Harrigan sitting silently across from him — until Craig has the wonderful idea to buy his employer a first generation iPhone.
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This way, he tells Mr Harrigan, they could communicate whenever they want to. Nobody acknowledges the strangeness of this set-up; not Craig, not Craig’s loving father, and certainly not Mr Harrigan. Although at one point the old man asks him why he continues to show up for their appointments, now that he probably has better things to do, and Craig spouts some nonsense about experiencing ‘a sense of power’ that he doesn’t have outside of that room. But that doesn’t explain why the entire town turns a blind eye on a reclusive old man who has a teenage boy visit him multiple times a week, ‘to read him stories’. Sure.
This isn’t even the weirdest thing about this movie, though. That happens when Mr Harrigan dies, and Craig, in a fit of sadness, sneaks the old man’s iPhone into his casket. And soon enough, he’s convinced that Mr Harrigan is texting him from six feet under. Time goes by, but the spectre of Mr Harrigan refuses to leave Craig alone. It was at this point that I, having given the film the benefit of the doubt, decided that it’s probably about sexual abuse. Childhood trauma is a favourite theme of King’s, and certainly, Mr Harrigan’s shady corporate background could easily be a stand-in for the Catholic church. In fact, I thought to myself, another horror film from this year — The Black Phone, based on a short story by King’s son Joe Hill — did a far better job with similar core concepts.
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But I was mistaken. Mr Harrigan’s Phone isn’t a movie about childhood trauma. It’s a movie about the ills of technology. It’s dull, utterly lacking in self-awareness, and painfully unadventurous. Imagine material like this in the hands of someone like Sam Raimi; it’ll pop, even if he sticks to the technophobia subtext.
In the hands of director John Lee Hancock, however, Mr Harrigan’s Phone is such a waste of time that even Netflix didn’t think it deserves a plum Halloween release date. Hancock has made all kinds of movies in his journeyman career — war dramas, Oscar-bait, goofy crime thrillers — but this is his first horror film. Perhaps the biggest indication that he’s actually treating this movie as some kind of serious cautionary tale about the fall of man comes at the end, when he gives himself the massively pretentious ‘written for the screen and directed by’ credit. For context, this is what people like Paul Thomas Anderson and Andrew Dominik would do.
And they most certainly aren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel for Stephen King movies to adapt, especially not the sort that you’d want to hang up on three minutes in.
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Mr Harrigan’s Phone
Director – John Lee Hancock
Cast – Jaeden Martell, Donald Sutherland
Rating – 1.5/5
