A recent release on Netflix, ‘Mr Harrigan’s phone’ movie is full of emotion suspense and ‘Horror’. Based on the short story of Stephen King, and directed by John Lee Hancock the movie revolves around a school going boy named Craig and a millionaire Mr Harrigon settled in small town of Harlow, Maine. In turn of events the millionaire Mr Harrigon a lonely person living alone chooses Craig to read books for him. One day Craig introduces Mr Harrigon to the world of mobile phone and teaches him the various uses of it. After using the phone for some time Mr Harrigon gets to understand the future effects of the mobile phone and word wide web popularly called as WWW.
The movie emphasis on two major social issues being faced by all the societies today:
First is the issue of loneliness in old aged people. Mr Harrigon despite being millionaire used to live alone in his ‘big’ home with no one to take care of him except his servants. This phenomenon is increasingly becoming evident in all the major societies. The large scale urbanisation has resulted into dehumanisation of people living in the cities. The movies tries to re-enforce the values of a family.
The second issue is of large scale use of mobile phones and internet by the modern societies. Mr Harrigon rightly remarks in the movie that those news articles which he can read free of cost on internet must have some hidden cost involved. As the polular saying goes: ‘if you don’t pay for the product then you are the product’. These things are now increasingly emerging into cyber frauds, online data breach and identity thefts etc.
Overall the movie is a good watch to understand the issues being faced by the older generations due to swift transition of societies into digital age.
Rating: 7.2/10