Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022)

Mr. Harrigan's Phone arrives with the pedigree of a Stephen King novella and the distribution muscle of Netflix, yet it conducts itself with the quiet manners of a small-town funeral. Craig, a boy in Maine, reads to a wealthy recluse, inherits his money and his ghost, and learns that wishing death upon one's enemies through a haunted iPhone is poor emotional hygiene. The casting is gently varied, with Kirby Howell-Baptiste lending warmth as the teacher Ms. Hart, but the film never announces its inclusiveness. It simply hires competent people and lets them act. There is something almost restful about that.

The ledger of contemporary concerns comes up largely empty. No queer romance, no racial reckoning, no dying planet, no celebration of the body, no neurodivergent awakening, no rewriting of the historical record. Harrigan's fortune exists to fund a trust and haunt a conscience, not to indict the ownership class. Ms. Hart mentors a boy and then dies offscreen, which is a plot function, not a gender argument. The film has no thesis to advance beyond the observation that grief makes people do regrettable things with telecommunications equipment.

Where a sermon might have been delivered, the film offers a murmur. The smartphone is treated as a vessel for resentment, a small glowing box that lets us reach the dead and say things we should not. That is a moral, certainly, but it is dramatized with restraint, buried in fog and autumn leaves. The result is a film of modest cultural ambition, competently made, genuinely sad, and content to let its audience draw its own conclusions. We classify it accordingly.