{"id":85842,"date":"2022-10-03T17:55:07","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T17:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/mr-harrigans-phone-review-a-thriller-about-the-horrors-of-phone-addiction\/"},"modified":"2022-10-03T17:55:07","modified_gmt":"2022-10-03T17:55:07","slug":"mr-harrigans-phone-review-a-thriller-about-the-horrors-of-phone-addiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/mr-harrigans-phone-review-a-thriller-about-the-horrors-of-phone-addiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr. Harrigan’s Phone review: a thriller about the horrors of phone addiction"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stephen King’s works are full of all kinds of memorable monsters and villains. The likes of the man in black, Pennywise the clown, and Jack Torrance are ingrained in pop culture. In the latest cinematic adaptation, though, the bad guy is n’t a guy at all: he’s an object. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone<\/em> is a horror story all about being addicted to your smartphone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This review contains spoilers for <\/em>Mr. Harrigan’s Phone (the book and the movie).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Based on the short story of the same name from King’s 2020 collection If It Bleeds<\/em>, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone<\/em> (written and directed by John Lee Hancock) follows the story of a young boy named Craig (Jaeden Martell, probably best-known for another King adaptation, with the modern it<\/em> movies) who lives with a single dad (Joe Tippett). Following the death of his mother, Craig takes on a job reading books out loud a few days a week for an aging billionaire (Donald Sutherland), who for some reason lives in a small New England town where he has no familial or business connections.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The movie starts out in 2003 and then skips forward four years to a time when Craig becomes extremely focused on a particular object of desire: the brand-new just-launched iPhone. His high school is in full smartphone fever, to the point that the cafeteria tables are divided by brand; one table for the Razr fans and another for the Apple crew.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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(King fans who are currently reading his latest novel, Fairy Tale<\/em>will probably get a feeling of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, as that book is also<\/em> about a young boy who loses his mother and goes on to work for a strange old man. Thankfully the stories diverge from there.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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During that time, Craig and Mr. Harrigan form a quiet kind of friendship. They meet several times a week, talk about books and life, and Mr. Harrigan sends him a card with a scratch ticket inside four times a year. For Christmas 2007, Craig gets a pretty good haul: not only does his dad get him that iPhone so he can sit at the cool table but also, after years of duds, his scratch card from Mr. Harrigan wins a cool $3,000. As a sign of his appreciation, Craig spends some of his windfall on an iPhone for his boss.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The thing about Mr. Harrigan is that he’s a technophobe of sorts. He doesn’t keep a TV or even a radio in the house because he knows that he’ll waste too much time with them. But he’s also a financial wizard (albeit a retired one) who stays occupied by trading stocks. So when his young employee shows him the iPhone’s stock app, with its numbers moving in near real time, Mr. Harrigan becomes transfixed. And once he realizes he can get the<\/em> Wall Street Journal<\/em> Articles the moment they’re published instead of waiting for the newspaper the next day, his fixation becomes something of an obsession. (He also predicts plenty of things that seem prescient now, like the rise of tracking software, conspiracy theories, and paywalls.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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About a third of the way through the movie \u2014 this is technically a spoiler, so be warned, but it’s very clearly choreographed from the start and also appears in the trailers \u2014 Mr. Harrigan dies. In a strange, spontaneous act, Craig slips his friend’s iPhone into the casket before he’s buried, ensuring his smartphone addiction will continue in the afterlife. And it’s here that Mr. Harrigan’s Phone<\/em> shifts from a quiet, contemplative story about a friendship that crosses generations to a thriller with possible supernatural elements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As Craig is grieving the death of his friend, he’s also being terrorized by an obsessive bully (Cyrus Arnold). To make things more frustrating, Mr. Harrigan was the kind of person Craig would come to for advice in just these kinds of situations; he was a good friend but also an absolutely ruthless businessman, the type who knew how to keep people from taking advantage of him. So even though it’s buried deep underground, Craig calls Mr. Harrigan’s phone to leave a message, and\u2026 weird things start to happen. He gets strange texts from Mr. Harrigan’s number and, eventually, it’s almost like the things he asks for from his dead friend start to come true. Brutal justice is doled out by a mysterious hand. This continues in more extreme ways as the story progresses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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