The Black Phone (2021)

While its foundation is firmly rooted in supernatural horror, *The Black Phone* excels as a mystery by presenting a uniquely contained and desperate investigation. The film centers on Finney, a young boy abducted by the sadistic "Grabber" and imprisoned in a soundproof basement. His only lifeline is a disconnected black phone on the wall, which begins to ring with calls from the killer's previous victims. Each cryptic call offers a fragment of a clue—a memory of a failed escape attempt, a detail about the basement, or a hint about the Grabber's weaknesses. The central mystery isn't just about who the killer is, but the far more urgent puzzle of how Finney can piece together these ghostly breadcrumbs to engineer his own survival before he meets the same fate as the voices on the phone. What elevates *The Black Phone* into the realm of great mystery is its brilliant dual-track investigation and its use of supernatural elements as a core deductive tool. The film masterfully balances Finney's claustrophobic, life-or-death puzzle-solving in the basement with the external search led by his fiercely determined sister, Gwen, whose psychic dreams provide crucial, albeit fragmented, visions to the police. Instead of traditional detective work, the narrative relies on the piecing together of ethereal clues, turning the ghosts of the past into a collective of otherworldly informants. The tension builds not just from the threat of the Grabber, but from the intellectual and emotional struggle to interpret the messages, making the final, hard-won solution a deeply satisfying and cleverly constructed resolution to a terrifying supernatural case.