The mostly quiet adaptation of Stephen King novella Mr Harrigan’s Phone is underscored by a distracting and familiar sound. It’s that desperate post-It scrape of the large barrel of stories he’s written, studios searching for third- and fourth-tier books to be dragged to the screen, an ungainly process that only serves to highlight the author’s weakest spots.
Recently, we’ve shrugged our way through Pablo Larraín’s visually arresting yet otherwise uninteresting Apple series Lisey’s Story, the dull Adrien Brody-led Chapelwaite based on Jerusalem’s Lot, a damp remake of Firestarter (a story that was never that interesting to begin with) and now, a thinly plotted 88-page short story becomes a bloated 106-minute Netflix movie, a competently made yet utterly inconsequential pre-Halloween time-waster. It’s stuck in that awkward place between two well-trodden King subgenres: small-town coming-of-age and small-town supernatural, never quite connecting as either. Too silly to be an involving drama and too subdued to be a creepy horror.
