Movie Review: CELLPHONE

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: February 23rd, 2024 / 03:11 AM

CELLPHONE movie poster | ©2024 Gravitas Ventures

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Whitney Rose Pynn, Justin Malik Jackson, Jared Noble, Isaac Versaw, Katherine Barber, Malcolm McDowell
Writer: Rachel Sommer
Director: Luke Sommer
Distributor: Gravitas Ventures
Release Date: February 13, 2024 (digital, VOD)

CELLPHONE has great, creepy atmosphere and a secret weapon in the performance of Justin Malik Jackson. Jackson plays the very un-creepy (once we get to know him) Chris, a talkative fellow who’s got problems of his own, but is friendly toward new neighbor Wynne (Whitney Rose Pynn).

We start by meeting a young couple in an isolated farmhouse. They are tensely checking their cellphones and affirm they love one another. By morning, the man has hanged himself.

Later, Wynne agrees to be caretaker of the hundred-year-old farmhouse for largely absentee owner Bob (Malcolm McDowell). Wynne is a young woman who feels so guilty about the car accident that killed her fiancé, Liam (Jared Noble), that she feels she deserves to be by herself in the middle of nowhere. She reckons without the curiosity and persistence of Chris, who is idiosyncratic, but genuinely concerned with Wynne’s well-being.

Bob notes that the place is haunted by “Betty,” a mischievous ghost. Something is certainly up at the farmhouse, but it’s more malevolent than mischievous. Wynne is having visions of Liam, both as a loving comforter and as a corpse. She’s also seeing ominous images on her cellphone. Additionally, the viewers are seeing things that Wynne doesn’t notice.

Directed by Luke Sommer from a script by Rachel Sommer, CELLPHONE has plenty of good horror elements. Director Sommer makes strong use of the labyrinthine surroundings and incongruous objects around the house, including some weird sculptures.

CELLPHONE is uncommonly perceptive in its small details of how people deal with PTSD, such as Wynne sleeping on a wooden bench instead of a bed.

But exposition gets doled out in ways that are less than helpful. Because CELLPHONE begins with a man hanging himself and promptly introduces us to the desolate Wynne, it takes us a while to understand that the suicide we’ve just witnessed is not that of Wynne’s beloved, or even of someone known to her.

Since Wynne is having hallucinations and nightmares, the cellphone seems just one more item that can be used in multiple ways. It’s part of the big picture, but not pivotal.

Then we move on to the matter of why this is happening now. We don’t get a clear explanation of this, nor of how often this happens, who knows about it, why they do or don’t know, and so on. We also don’t know much about either the origins or the power boundaries of the supernatural element, so that by the third act, we’re less frightened than somewhat perplexed.

The best parts of CELLPHONE are actually the scenes of the growing platonic relationship between Wynne and Chris. Jackson invests his character with an irrefutable internal logic that makes us want to follow him into his own story. This one has its moments, but winds up with too many un-filled-in blanks.

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Eerie but uneven supernatural horror

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