Phreaker (Fantastic Fest 2026)

Apparently it started with a whistle. A blind child from Richmond, Virginia, Josef Engressia, whistled down a phone line, heard a strange click, then realised he had free phone calls for life. This incident, which is dramatised in flashback in Adam Yorke’s debut film Phreaker, was the birth of “phone phreaking”, a subculture devoted to hacking landline telephones. More importantly, it was the birth of a lot of modern computer culture – Apple’s Steve Wozniak was a keen phreaker – and hacking as a way of life. This continued relevance might be why phreaking keeps coming back up in popular culture; a documentary about Engressia, Joybubbles, just premiered at Sundance. It is a way to make films about the internet without them literally being about the internet.

For Yorke, whose film reportedly had a ten-year gestation period before its Fantastic Fest premiere, this is a lifeline. If Phreaker has been a passion project of Yorke’s for ten years, that means he started work on it at a point when Reddit was a breeding ground for the alt-right, Tumblr was popular and TikTok was unknown, and everyone was doing the mannequin challenge. Clearly, any film about the internet as it exists now would be hopelessly out of date by the end of that production process. What Yorke has made instead is a film about the seed of the internet, where the technology might not be familiar but the attitudes and social dynamics are clearly still relevant. There is the odd retro laugh-line – a character excitedly describes YouTube as “a new site – got more s**t than eBaumsworld!” – but the overall impression is of a story that needed to be told now.

Phreaker concerns a fictional character, Jake Bellman, played magnificently by Cole Asher Phillips. Like Engressia, he’s blind, and he’s thrown into the world of the “party lines” – disused test lines where phreaks congregate – by a chance whistle. Yorke is particularly good at capturing the paradox of a packed-out party where nobody is in the same room, splintering the screen into mosaics of faces and mouths as Jake discovers this new world. It’s an overload, but it’s also a liberation. Suddenly the disability that limits Jake in the physical world becomes an asset in this new virtual one, as he uses perfect pitch, a talent for mimicry and a newfound gift for hacking to become popular and – when someone crosses him – to level the field.

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At the risk of falling into autobiographical mode, one of the big heartbreaks of spending years on an independent film script comes when someone else’s movie pre-empts your idea. It’s easy to imagine Yorke being crestfallen when Sorry to Bother You came out, as Phreaker’s lip-synced prank calls do resemble the “white voice” in Boots Riley’s film. He was right to keep his nerve, though. The two films are different yet complementary enough to make a solid double-bill on the unusual theme of landline telephones as liberation from the trap of ideology. Jake’s escape is vicariously enjoyable, pure misfit-made-good joy. After a particularly precision-strike phone prank, he twirls the phone around and blows imaginary gun-smoke off the receiver, and composer Owen Pallett gives him the kind of pulse-pounding synth score that befits the movie playing in his head at moments like this.

The movie playing in his head isn’t always the movie he’s in, though, and as Phreaker goes on Yorke introduces a more tragicomic element that’s extremely well-handled. Without spoiling anything, the ending is something other than the straightforward triumph Jake thinks he deserves, and this is another area where Phreaker works well as an origin story for the internet we have today. Just because an underdog is given power doesn’t mean they’re going to use it any more fairly than their persecutors did, and from the cold open onwards there’s a lot of swatting and sexual humiliation in the mix here. Jake is, at least, above the latter; his greatest triumphs come during his revenge vendetta against a phreak who sexually harasses Giorgia Whigham’s Katherine. Yet for all his justifiable anger against an ableist world, he’s never a completely comfortable character. Asked why he does what he does, he says it’s better to be feared than pitied, and while he’s not wrong you do wonder if he’s fully explored the options in between. What about being liked?

But Phreaker isn’t just an origin story for trolling. It uses its historical distance from the modern internet to acknowledge the freedom, the pleasure, the justice that’s possible with unaccountable anonymity, and it leaves you gently hopeful that we might discover a better form of that. The party lines, as one character notes early on, have lain dormant since the 1930s – who’s to say we couldn’t dig up some older, better internet and reinvent it just as the phreaks did with phone lines? Phreaker is set some decades after Engressia’s breakthrough, in the mid-2000s, so there’s a wistful end-of-an-era quality as well, the last moment of landline supremacy. It wears its period setting lightly: there’s a superb White Stripes needle-drop over the opening credits, and The Punisher‘s Whigham is given a note-perfect Buffy/Charmed makeover. It is equally graceful with its contemporary relevance, leaving the hindsight to the viewer. And it has heart – in the end, it’s about finding someone to make beautiful whistles with.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – PHREAKER