Black Phone 2 (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

The Black Phone was, in my opinion, over-hyped and hasn't really stood the test of time, even in only four years. I liked it well enough, but repeat viewings have made its substantial plot holes increasingly difficult to swallow. Some movies are just meant to be seen once and enjoyed as such; Derrickson's mastery of suggestive suspense and brutal scares is too profound for him to make a mediocre cinematic experience. However, the story was simplistic, messy, and too vague for its own good. Perhaps that's why Ethan Hawke's villainous Grabber character has maintained its interest: he's enigmatic enough to be upsetting. I think of him the way I think of Michael Myers: sure, he's scary enough, but it's not until he should be dead and rises again anyway that we really lock into the horror Laurie Strode is up against.

When a sequel was announced, I blanched. Joe Hill only wrote a single short story, and that was adapted into the first film; what could happen next, with the Grabber dead? But I'm glad I reserved judgment, because Black Phone 2, despite its terrible title, took me on a wild ride that scared me, provoked my curiosity in refreshing ways, and eventually helped me think of its predecessor in a kinder light. That's pretty remarkable these days, with strung-along sequels and remakes that never try to do something really weird and make it work.

I won't recount much plot here, because piecing it together is part of the fun to be had, but Black Phone 2 relocates Finney and Gwen, now considerably older, to a Christian camp alongside a mountainous lake in their home state of Colorado. Led by Gwen's visions of their dead mother's time working there, the kids (and Gwen's new boyfriend) arrive amidst a terrible snowstorm, isolating them in cabins along with the four camp staffers stationed there. Gwen's visions worsen, and Finney receives calls via the camp's decommissioned payphone: the Grabber, long dead, has figured out a way to seek revenge on Finney for killing him. The logic is a bit unclear, but he's haunting a site of his own early murders, reinforcing the psychic connection between the Grabber and the kids through their mother, whose unwelcome visions allowed her to see his victims and eventually drove her mad (and to suicide, as was presumed in the previous film). 

Less like Michael Myers and more like Freddy Krueger, this film swings into directions I was not at all expecting, and Derrickson's aesthetic choices in the first film are doubled down on here, making his earlier choices make more sense. For example, the first film features intercuts of what appear to be Super 8mm footage indicating the abduction/murder scenes of what we know to be missing persons; it's utilizing a sort of mockumentary/found footage technique for no reason because of course no one was filming those crimes. Yet in this film, it's finally clear that that technique is simply a visual cue as to how Gwen's visions appear: grainy, blurry, awkwardly spliced together. Whereas I thought it was, before, a cheap ploy capitalizing on Derrickson's terrifying successes in Sinister (which it may well have been), now I see it as a suitably reasonable approach to non-anachronistic visual representation that the character herself would be familiar with.

Regardless, the Grabber's crimes are no longer so pedestrian, and here he's got a nasty axe to grind. Literally. The bloody violence of this film had me gagged, and I mean that literally as well, because it was not what I expected. Hawke returns, and this time he's not quite as chillingly spooky; nor is he as sexually suggestive, which I both liked and wish we had some closure about. His first outing was like Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates: performative and cerebral, rather femme and quietly disturbed. This time, he's full-on psycho, an edge of diabolic malevolence to his gravelly voice, launching headfirst into rooms from shadowy corners and taking broad swings with his weapons of choice. He's not going to trick or toy with his victims now. He's going to dismember them. 

Surreal nightmare logic won't work for everyone, but this movie worked for me on that front. I also liked that Gwen takes more of a leading role here, and the actors (excellent already in the first film) deliver shockingly mature performances yet again. Finney has the thankless position of trying to become a man with the only role model of his father (Jeremy Davies, who returns in a diminished capacity here), who is only tenuously no longer alcoholic and abusive. Naturally, Finney has some junk still to sort through mentally, and he's numbing his pain and his life as a result. Gwen's visions this time are more brutal, and so is her treatment by the Grabber, making the nature of violence in this film a really cool counterpoint to the first: then, it was suggestive, abductive, and sexual, whereas now, it's explicit, bodily, and psychic. 

This is still a big-budget slasher film, even with its ghostly elements, and it doesn't all cohere the way we might want. Rather than allowing the kids' dynamics to breathe naturally, they're forced into conversations that reveal key things laid out as breadcrumbs by the writers, building to a contrived climax that only works as the sum of these crumbs. The camp staffers, including Demian Bichir and Arianna Rivas, are mostly forgettable, only there to allow the kids chances to explain what's happening and to spur them on to make tough decisions and help with physical tasks, such as searching a frozen lake for bodies stashed there more than twenty years prior. 

Crazy? Yeah, and that's the kind of weird thing that a film like this should have worked out in, well, workshop. Derrickson is too good to let a weird screenplay get in his way, but this story (like the previous one) could have used some serious help in development. But if you're willing to let plot holes and strange logical jumps be what they are, Black Phone 2 has boons in store. Terrifyingly choreographed and edited sequences turn nightmarish visions into impossible realities, shifting between visual modes as we watch the Grabber viciously tearing apart his victims while, in waking cuts, bodies of teenagers are flung about with spurts of blood. Derrickson and his cinematographer milk the snowy, mountainous landscape for all its worth, often using window panes and ice as our actual frame into their world. And while Derrickson's penchant for religious content isn't gone here -- Gwen still talks to Jesus for help in her wonderfully crass way, and the Grabber's mask is about as demonic as you can get -- it does feel earned and grounded in ways we so rarely see (these are not idolatrous possession films bogged down in Catholic imagery or emotionally manipulative Warren-esque normative families). This works surprisingly well in a film that basically turns a one-off spooky story into a full-fledged supernatural slasher franchise. Where else has the Grabber killed kids? Will he go on to haunt those places, too?