- Directed by Scott Derrickson
- Written by Joe Hill, Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill
- Stars Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Ethan Hawke
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 43 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eGP6im8AZA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
They took a basic idea and dialed it up to eleven with supernatural elements. An excellent cast including the kids and a gripping script. Suspenseful and really very good all around.
Synopsis
In Denver, 1978, we start at a baseball game. The pitcher, Finney, throws two strikes, but then the other player, Bruce, hits a home run– and the game is over. Bruce sees a black van approaching, and – credits roll, with photos of newspapers declaring, “missing person,” “lost child,” and more. We see lots of missing person posters.
We see Finney and his little sister tiptoeing around to avoid disturbing their father’s hangover. On the way to school, they spot the flyers about Bruce, who’s been gone for a while now. They also watch two kids fighting, and the big one, Moose, isn’t going to get up again on his own. Robin is the toughest kid in the school since “The Grabber” got Vince Hopper. Even the papers call him The Grabber. Finney’s afraid to say the kidnapper’s name; it’s almost legendary. After school, Finney is accosted by three bullies. Robin talks about having bloody knuckles; the other three go away fast. Robin and Finney talk about watching “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Finney’s sister, Gwen, gets called into the office to talk to the police. She had a dream about Bruce that he was taken by a man in a black van with black balloons at the crime scene. They want to know how she knew about the balloons, since that was kept out of the papers. Her father beats her when the police come to his work. She’s psychic like her mother, but her father denies it and tries to beat it out of her. Elsewhere, we see Robin walking alone with a black van in the background…
Finney asks Gwen to “do the dream thing” to do something to help his friend, but she says it doesn’t work that way. The next morning, the police come to talk to Gwen to see if she knows anything about Robin’s disappearance. With Robin missing, the bullies are all over Finney until Gwen tries to defend him. After school that day, Finney finds a strange man spilling groceries out of a black van. Finney soon winds up in the back of that van.
The Grabber, wearing a strange mask, explains that “nothing bad is going to happen here,” once Finney wakes up. He’s in a dark basement with only a mattress, toilet, and a disconnected telephone. Gwen and her father finally realize Finney is missing and get the cops involved.
Finney hears the black phone ringing, but The Grabber, in a different mask, says that it hasn’t worked since he was a kid. The cord is not even connected any more. Static electricity or something makes it ring sometimes, he says. Later, the phone rings again, but there’s no one there. The next time, Finney hears a voice. “I don’t remember my name. It’s the first thing you lose.” It’s Bruce. “The Grabber hears it ring too, but he doesn’t believe it,” Bruce whispers over the phone. Bruce tells Finney about a tunnel he could dig under the tiles. Finney starts digging when he has the chance.
At one point, The Grabber leaves the door unlocked, but a black phone voice warns him not to go upstairs, because it’s a trap. She says he’s waiting upstairs to beat him with a belt. Then he will be “naughty” in The Grabber’s mind, and he’ll be able to justify killing him. It’s a twisted sort of game he plays. Finney doesn’t go upstairs, but we see that the girl on the phone was right. Billy, another missing kid, calls and tells Finney about a cable he had hidden in a crack in the floor. The dead kids seem to be helping Finney.
Elsewhere, Gwen dreams about the kidnappings, and each time, she sees more. She has a talk with her father, who admits that her mother saw things too, and it was so awful it drove her to kill herself. He desperately doesn’t want his daughter to be subjected to that too. “What if it could help me find Finney?” she asks. The two start driving around looking for recognizable things.
Canvassing the area, two detectives run into Max, a guy who lives with his brother and has a “crazy wall” related to the missing people. They aren’t too interested in what he has to say.
Finney gets another call, this one tells him that The Grabber is asleep, and there’s a combination to a padlock carved into the wall nearby. It’s 23317, but he doesn’t know how the numbers are broken up. He’ll need this later.
Finney goes up the stairs, past the too-conveniently-unlocked door, past the sleeping Grabber, and to the front door, which is padlocked. He tries the various possibilities of the combination. He opens the door, and the dog starts barking, waking up the Grabber, who chases Finney down the street outside and recaptures him.
Gwen has a dream/flashback to what happened with Vance. She sees the Grabber’s house and address.
When Finney wakes up, he gets a call from Vance, who says that today’s the day. Vance tells him how to get out of the room by breaking through the wall with the toilet tank cover. He does this, but can’t get through because the freezer on the other side is locked.
Robin calls and says he’s been with Finney the whole time. Robin tells him to fight back. Use the handset of the phone as a weapon! It’s already heavy, stuff it with dirt to make it heavier. Robin says that this will be the last phone call. “Get out. Use what we gave you.”
Piece by piece, Finney uses the bits and pieces of what he has to set up some booby traps. Outside, Gwen rides her bike around looking for The Grabber’s house. She gets some supernatural help and finds it. She calls the detectives.
Amateur sleuth Max snorts some coke and stares intently at his crazy wall map. He goes into the basement and finds Finney. He’s excited that he was right. He knew his brother was hiding something from him. Until he gets an ax in the head. The Grabber laments to Finney about what Finney made him do. “He was an idiot,” he says of his dead brother, “but he was my idiot.” Outside, Gwen points out the house to the detectives. The Grabber approaches Finney with the ax. Upstairs, the police storm in and realize it’s a completely empty house. But they find a hidden basement door.
In the basement where Finney is, he does indeed fight back, and he wins. The hidden basement the cops enter is where the bodies have been buried, but it’s not where Finney is. Finney comes out of the house across the street and is soon surrounded by Gwen and the police. Turns out, The Grabber owned two homes.
Commentary
The time period, 1978, looks about right. It’s like they were trying to do “Stranger Things” but keep it a little different. It’s got school fights, child kidnappings, and ass-whippings, so, yeah the 70s.
The Grabber has several masks in the same style but with different expressions. They are really cool. It’s pretty clear from the beginning that there’s some supernatural stuff going on, but it definitely intensifies as the film progresses. Each of the missing dead kids helps out a little, telling Finney what he needs to escape.
Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw, as Finney and Gwen, are great here, which is unusual for young actors. Ethan Hawke, as the Grabber, is fine, but we hardly even see his face. Still, it was good!