If you remember 2022’s The Black Phone, you’ll believe me when I tell you Black Phone 2 is a verrrry different film, with much more going on. But before we get into that, a brief recap of the first The Black Phone. (Warning! Spoilers loom!)
Set in the Colorado of 1978, Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeline McGraw) are a pair of siblings whose mom took her own life a few years ago, leaving their dad an abusive drunk. The kids cling to each other. Their small town is tense due to reports of someone dubbed The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) who has been abducting local boys. He drives a black van, leaves black balloons everywhere, and wears a terrifying mask. Soon Finn becomes The Grabber’s next victim, finding himself in a cement basement that has only a black telephone on the wall. It’s broken, except… Finn receives calls from the boys The Grabber killed. They give him escape hints. Meanwhile, Gwen’s psychic dreams give the police leads. This is one of those rare horror films where the good guy has a chance.
For Black Phone 2 the question is: how do you make a sequel when the original villain is kaput? This is where Gwen’s psychic dreams come into play. The character emphasis has shifted: we’re getting more her story than Finn’s.
It’s four years later and Finn is filled with anger. He fights, has no friends, and gets high all the time. He resents that Gwen is getting close to Ernie (Miguel Mora), brother of one of The Grabber’s victims. Gwen keeps having weird dreams involving boys brutally killed in the ice (which is very The Dead Zone of her). She also dreams she’s speaking to a version of her late mother when she was roughly the same age as Gwen. Her mom had been a counselor at a Christian winter camp, and Gwen decides to follow suit. A winter camp, boys killed in ice….see where this is going? Ernie, now crushing majorly on Gwen, follows her to the camp — as does Finn, overprotective of his sister.
The trio drive into the mountains (which is very The Shining of them), getting hit by a major blizzard. They are the only ones who mke it to the camp, aside from a few of the adults who run the place, including owner Mondo (Demian Bichir). In the snowed-in days that follow, Finn gets unnerving calls on a broken pay phone, and Gwen’s dreams get more severe. Sleepwalking, she sees The Grabber, who lives up to his name. The injuries he gives her carry into real life.
I don’t won’t spoil anything further, but this film’s strengths do not rely on big reveals or twists anyway. That’s a positive. Black Phone 2 just tells a good story, where everything feels like a natural progression.
That said, there is a lot going on, not always consequentially. Gwen deals with some very Nightmare on Elm Street-type dreams; The Grabber has more supernatural vibes than initially planned; Finn’s phone keeps ringing off the damned haunted hook; and Ernie, alas, comes across as a wrong number.
Despite its inconsistency, I enjoyed Black Phone 2 more than The Black Phone. I cannot quite explain why. Maybe it is because the pieces in the first film that felt unnecessary (like Gwen’s dreams) finally have a purpose. Maybe it is because this film doesn’t drum to the same beatings; it has its own rhythm and direction. Maybe it is because this film gets gorier than its predecessor, for which sustained suspense felt like just a warm-up. Black Phone 2 builds, on all levels, to a more satisfying call. I also really liked that we got to see Finn deal with his trauma. We don’t often get to see that from a male perspective in horror films.
Director Scott Derrickson does a great job sustaining a creepy (dial) tone. The only showy trick he uses is shooting Gwen’s dream sequences hand-held and a bit blurry. The technique annoyed me at first, but by the second dream sequence I came to like it. He also makes the soundtrack great – playing up noises till my nerves frazzled. It reminded me of Sinister (another unsettling Ethan Hawke film) in that way.
Black Phone 2 has brilliant things going for it, along with a few unnecessary plot points. While it signals busily, it’s never confusing or overwhelming. I rate the movie twelve disoriented psychic dreams, four disturbed grabbings, seven broken rotary phones, 25 Ethan Hawke piano-like teeth, and 99 black balloons out of 147 Freddy Krueger glove blades.
