Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is the kind of movie that makes you nostalgic—not for your childhood, or your first cell phone, or even Stephen King, but for the days when you could turn something off without wondering if it might be offended and kill someone. This 2022 Netflix “horror” film, written and directed by John Lee Hancock, takes a perfectly good Stephen King novella about grief, power, and technology… and turns it into a politely sedated Lifetime movie with occasional homicide.
If you’ve ever thought, “What if The Ring had no suspense and the killer was passive-aggressive texting from beyond the grave?”—congratulations, this one’s for you.
Emotional Support Billionaire
Our protagonist, Craig Poole, loses his mother and is hired to read to retired businessman John Harrigan, played by Donald Sutherland, who delivers his lines like he’s already halfway into the afterlife and just waiting for craft services to catch up. Their relationship is the emotional core of the film, and to be fair, those scenes are the best part—largely because nothing supernatural is happening yet and no iPhone has been buried where it definitely shouldn’t be.
The movie clearly wants this odd-couple friendship to feel profound. Instead, it plays like a weekly tutoring gig that accidentally picked up feelings. Harrigan is rich, grumpy, and likes literature; Craig is lonely, earnest, and somehow never questions why this old man wants a teenage boy reading to him in a sprawling mansion with a locked “secret closet.” In any other horror film, that closet would contain a demon, a corpse, or at least a cursed ventriloquist dummy. Here, it holds… backstory and sentiment. Which is about as exciting as it sounds.
iHorror: The Slowest App Ever
The premise kicks in when Craig wins some money from a lottery ticket gifted by Harrigan and buys them both iPhones. Harrigan initially resists, then becomes fascinated, like every boomer discovering that yes, you can check stock prices on the toilet. So far, so plausible. Then Harrigan dies, and Craig sneaks the phone into the coffin—because nothing says “healthy grieving process” like burying a live device with a dead guy.
When Craig later calls the buried phone and gets weird texts back, we’re supposed to be unsettled. Instead, it mainly raises practical questions. How’s the battery life? Did Verizon open a branch in the spirit realm? Is there roaming in the cemetery? The movie politely declines to answer, which could be eerie if it weren’t also lethargic.
The film’s idea of horror is:
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Craig calls dead billionaire.
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Something bad happens to someone Craig is upset with.
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Craig stares at his phone like it just autocorrected his soul.
It’s less “terror” and more “mildly regrettable tech support ticket.”
Be Careful What You Wish for (But Slowly, Very Slowly)
First up to die: Kenny, the school bully. After a run-in at a dance, Craig vents to Dead Harrigan via voicemail and says he’s afraid it won’t end. The next morning, Kenny is found dead after falling out his window. It should feel like a horrifying turning point—Craig’s grief curdling into power. Instead, it plays like karma delivered by FedEx One Day Express, with zero suspense and even less style.
Later, when Ms. Hart—Craig’s kind, supportive teacher—is killed by repeat drunk driver Dean Whitmore, the film finally has a clear emotional target. Craig is furious, Whitmore gets rehab instead of prison, and Craig rage-dials the grave. The next time we hear about Whitmore, he’s dead in a shower having apparently committed the world’s least dignified suicide with soap and shampoo.
Craig tracks down the details: same soap Ms. Hart used, a suicide note quoting Harrigan’s old ringtone. These are meant to be chilling, cosmic connections. They mostly feel like the movie elbowing you in the ribs, whispering, “Get it? GET IT?”
The Ghost of Morality Lectures Past
One of the film’s biggest problems is that it can’t decide what it wants to be. Supernatural revenge thriller? Coming-of-age drama? Tech-paranoia horror? Quiet meditation on grief? It chooses all of the above and then does them all at half power, like it’s worried about disturbing anyone’s evening.
The supernatural mechanics are barely explained. Is Harrigan consciously doing this? Is Craig the one channeling dark intent? Is the phone cursed? Haunted? Running on some kind of eldritch unlimited data? The movie raises questions and then backs away, like it’s afraid if it gets too specific, someone might accidentally feel something.
Instead, we’re left with long stretches of Craig frowning at devices and occasionally muttering that maybe he shouldn’t keep asking a dead man to perform informal executions. The moral is basically, “Killing people with spectral phone calls is bad, actually,” which is not exactly a radical stance.
A Horror Movie Afraid of Horror
For a supernatural horror film, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is strangely allergic to actual scares. No real jump scares, minimal dread, and absolutely no commitment to visual horror beyond the occasional dead body and some dim lighting.
There’s a version of this story that leans into unsettling imagery: the coffin, the buried phone, glitching texts, distorted calls, impossible ring tones echoing from nowhere. Instead, the film mostly uses the phone as a plot device and a metaphor, never as a real source of terror. It’s like someone optioned a horror novella but then tried very hard not to upset anyone who came for the heartfelt coming-of-age angle.
What we get is a movie that wants to be chilling but politely ends up being… cool-ish. Tepid. Room temperature horror.
Massively Wasted Talent Plan
The cast is frankly too good for this material. Donald Sutherland brings gravitas to Harrigan, but the script doesn’t let him go full sinister or fully benevolent. He’s just vaguely imposing with money and opinions. Jaeden Martell does his best as Craig, but he’s stuck playing the cinematic equivalent of a long sigh. Kirby Howell-Baptiste is warm and likable as Ms. Hart, which only highlights how little the story does with her before shoving her into a plot-triggering accident.
You can feel the potential in nearly every scene: this could be a genuinely haunting story about grief, class, and the power imbalance between a rich old man and the boy he shapes from beyond the grave. Instead, the film nudges those ideas and then dozes off.
Pacing by Tranquilizer
The pacing is another problem. The story crawls when it should tighten and sprints through parts that might actually have been compelling. The time jump from high school to college is handled with all the urgency of updating a Facebook status. Difficult emotional beats are often skimmed over, while we spend long, quiet stretches watching Craig exist in rooms and occasionally look out windows like he’s auditioning for a melancholy phone commercial.
By the time Craig throws his old phone into the quarry, declaring that he wants his pockets empty when he dies, it’s supposed to be this big cathartic moment—letting go of guilt, power, and temptation. But the movie has been so emotionally muted that it barely lands. It’s like watching someone dramatically uninstall a mildly annoying app.
Final Verdict: Weak Signal, Dropped Story
Mr. Harrigan’s Phone had all the ingredients for a sharp, unnerving little horror film: Stephen King source material, a strong cast, a timely tech hook, and a story about the dangerous comfort of power, even when it comes wrapped in grief. Instead, it delivers a bland, tonally confused slow burn that’s so gentle it barely registers as horror at all.
It’s not offensively bad; it’s just disappointingly safe. The scariest thing about it is realizing you spent nearly two hours watching a movie where the big supernatural threat is essentially “be careful who you call when you’re upset.”
If you’re a King completist or in the mood for something extremely low-key and melancholy with a thin layer of supernatural frosting, you might find some value here. Everyone else might be better off doing literally anything else with their phone—like, say, calling a friend who’s alive and won’t mysteriously murder people for you on the side.
