2025 | starring Mason Thames, Madeline McGraw, Ethan Hawke, Demian Bechir, Jeremy Davies | directed by Scott Derrickson | 1 hr 54 mins | 3 out of 5 stars |
2025 Halloween Horrorfest # 10 (finale)
Contains Spoilers for The Black Phone (2021)
Several years after taking down serial killer The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) during his own kidnapping, Finn (Mason Thames) and his sister, Gwen (Madeline McGraw) have been relegated to outcasts in their school. When Gwen starts having visions of her mother at a Colorado Christian winter camp looking into the death of 3 campers, she and Finn travel out to the camp to investigate what happened to their mother and are lured again toward a ringing phone in a camp ground phone booth that announces the return of The Grabber from beyond the veil.
Scott Derrickson’s 2021 adaptation of Joe Hill’s The Black Phone was a tight, compact, self-contained piece of 70s throwback supernatural horror film with just enough Stephen King tropes to hit big in the latest King renaissance. It presented us with a new villain in The Grabber, with a terrific performance from Ethan Hawke, and then, as these movies tend to do, killed him off. But the demand for a sequel was too great and The Grabber needed to make a return. While this presented a problem for franchises like Saw and Halloween, for The Black Phone the answer was baked into the premise. As self-contained movies go, Black Phone 2 trips an ingeniously conceived trap door that opens up fertile creative ground for a host of future sequel opportunities. With Derrickson back at the helm and all the original actors returning, Black Phone 2 looked like an absolute slam dunk.
That the film doesn’t quite get there is not through a big dumb idea or a gaping plot hole or the usual mistakes that sink movies. This movie is loaded with talent and style, but little by little it starts to cut into itself. Pacing becomes a big issue as it takes a very long time for the movie to get going. The script is bloated where the first film was tight. It introduces a lot of lore into the world of Finn and The Grabber and it starts to get cluttered and silly the more it goes. It’s frustration and disappointment measured in inches that start to pile up.
The eventual frustration of Black Phone 2 is compounded by the fact (I would say) that all of the big decisions are both bold and correct. The movie switches focus from Finn to first film stand-out Gwen in another solid turn from McGraw as the foul-mouthed teenage psychic. The production shifts settings from 70s suburbia to a snowy 80s camp-grounds changing the entire visual aesthetic to icy cold. Best of all, it brings back The Grabber using the same ghostly logic that helped Finn escape in the first film, turning the serial killer into a ghoul right out of Nightmare on Elm Street where death only let the genie out of the bottle and turned him into a force that can stalk and kill in the dreams of our protagonists. This leads to some inventive set pieces, that the movie doles out in unsatisfyingly small doses because the movie seems to want to be seen as a prestige horror film about grief and trauma – not a supernatural thriller where a dream demon in a literal devil mask can drag people around in their sleep.
With all the fun stuff unloaded in the back end, the first half of the movie is full of false starts and labored plotting on arranging the pieces in this entry’s mystery. Who are these kids and why are they scratching numbers and letters into the ice? I’m not a fan of psychic visions driving the story, but this movie uses that trope well, giving Gwen just enough in pieces to drive the mystery but not hand over all the explanations. Our protagonists are still actively driving the story, instead of being led around by visions. But we’re 4 or 5 mysterious trips to the phone booth before things start kicking into gear and deep into the movie before The Grabber finally shows up. With the Grabber only focusing on Gwen, the body count is pretty low for an 80s nostalgia-baited horror movie, and the carnage is next to zero.
Hawke is buried under a mask and gore make-up this time, mostly relegated to a voice on the phone, and the result is our monster is neither as threatening as he was in the first film or as playfully evil as Freddy Krueger is. The film’s stark, real world aesthetic cuts sharply against the dream world sequences where the movie starts to get silly. Spinning our main characters like tops and dragging them around the ice with axes works in a Nightmare movie, but here that level of lunacy isn’t set up. Someone should have looked at the image of The Grabber figure skating around the screen and noticed something not geling in the tone here.
It’s too bad because I respect the heck out of what this movie is doing. Particularly in how it gives The Black Phone life to turn into a franchise. Black Phone 2 really needs to pick a lane. Either go full hog wild in the Elm Street slasher surrealism and cut down on the murder-of-the-week storyline or become an indulgent auteur piece piling on Grabber lore, mysteries and surreal dream set pieces. I’d lean toward the later. Twist a few nobs here, give the guy complete creative freedom to make the film weirder and this could have been Derrickson’s Terrifier 2, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink horror opus that’s longer, gorier and more niche. Instead, we remain caught, between the real world and the dream world of what could have been.