Disclaimer: This review contains spoilers for the first Black Phone movie
Released in 2021, The Black Phone cast Ethan Hawke as a scary serial killer wearing an instantly-iconic mask, and Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw as the teen siblings tasked with taking him down, with a supernatural twist of the murder victims calling the teens from beyond the grave, helping to solve their own murders.
Four years later, we have Black Phone 2, which is set four years after the original (natch), taking the action to 1982. Despite his death in the previous film, The Grabber is back. If his victims could call the living from beyond the grave, why can’t the killer do the same?
There’s no shortage of sequels out there that rehash the original, eschewing originality for more blood and guts. The Black Phone wasn’t initially intended to be a franchise, so there’s no reason for Black Phone 2 to be good. By all logic, Black Phone 2 is primed to be a disaster… But it’s not. In fact, it might even be better than the original.
It helps that the original director (Scott Derrickson) and writing team (Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill) returned for this sequel, which carries a budget of $30 million, more than $10 million over the original. It’s not like Blumhouse hired a bunch of dweebs to make a cheap and dirty knockoff of their own film. Black Phone 2 feels like a passion project, like Derrickson and Cargill had a spark of imagination that they felt would make for a great sequel.
The basic gist of it is that The Grabber is back from beyond the grave, using the unsolved murders of his earliest victims to maintain a degree of power in the land of the living. Finny and Gwen must solve these decades-old murders in order to send The Grabber back to Hell. The hook this time is how Black Phone 2 is deeply, even faith-affirmingly, religious. These days, most religious-themed movies are either right-wing propaganda, or exorcism movies that use spirituality as vague window dressing for supernatural antics. Black Phone 2 directly confronts the idea of the afterlife, as well as the difference between believing in something versus actually acting in service of that belief. The result is a profoundly pious film about a ragtag group of people with varying degrees of religious belief and how they work together to fight a genuine evil.
While the original Black Phone was built as a ‘one-and-done’ movie, the world of the film was rich in themes and characterization, and the sequel gets a ton of mileage out of naturally continuing the stories established in the first. While Mason Thames’ Finney is still ostensibly the film’s lead, the focus is much more on his younger sister, Gwen, and her supernatural dreams, a trait she inherited from her mother, who died by suicide in the backstory of the first film. Likewise, the kids’ father, played by Jeremy Davies, who wasn’t much more than a sad drunk in the first film, gets a lot more to do this time around. The supporting cast, including Demián Bichir and Arianna Rivas, also get plenty of chances to shine.
Despite a bigger emotional scope, Black Phone 2 benefits from its constrained setting. Most of the film is set at a Christian sleepaway camp, with the characters prevented from leaving thanks to a once-in-a-generation blizzard. It’s a great location for the terror, and you get a real sense of geography as the movie goes on and the mystery unravels. The plot itself isn’t terribly complex, but there’s still plenty of twists and turns, though The Grabber’s backstory is still more-or-less off-limits for exploration. Maybe they’re saving that for Black Phone 3?
One element of the film that’s sure to be divisive is The Grabber’s new ability, attacking Gwen during her dreams. If you can get over the obvious Freddy Krueger comparisons, the dream sequences are a stylistic highlight of Black Phone 2. They’re shot in a grainy, dirty, “Super 8” style and feature some striking supernatural imagery and some horrific moments that will stick with you long after the movie ends. These are also where Ethan Hawke shines brightest. He doesn’t go over-the-top hammy like Freddy, but he’s not a silent killer like Michael or Jason. With a mix of subtlety and unhinged rage, Hawke uses The Grabber’s second act to hone the character into a singular horror icon without peer.
Black Phone 2 is my favorite kind of sequel, in that it gives you everything you want, but also plenty of what you didn’t even know you needed. It’s a little disturbing but hugely crowd-pleasing. Scott Derrickson and his team (including his son, composer Atticus Derrickson, who delivers a hauntingly esoteric score) successfully managed to turn the original parable of The Black Phone into a proper mythology that avoids cynicism in favor of crafting believable, three-dimensional characters and a thematically rich story that builds upon its predecessor in every way without retreading the same ground. At this point, whatever Scott Derrickson wants to do next, I’m already 100% in to go wherever he wants to take me…
Final Score: 9/10
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