THE STORY – As Finn, now 17, struggles with life after his captivity, his sister begins receiving calls in her dreams from the black phone and seeing disturbing visions of three boys being stalked at a winter camp known as Alpine Lake.
THE CAST – Ethan Hawke, Madeleine McGraw, Mason Thames, Demián Bichir, Jeremy Davies, Miguel Mora & Arianna Rivas
THE TEAM – Scott Derrickson (Director/Writer) & C. Robert Cargill (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 114 Minutes
When a low-budget horror flick does well at the box office, nine times out of ten that means it’s getting a sequel. Never mind if it makes sense based on the story or characters; if there’s money to be made, then Hollywood will find a way to make it. Everybody wants their own “Friday the 13th” or “Saw,” and you can’t blame Blumhouse for wanting another one now that “Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious,“ and “The Purge“ all have their best days behind them (RIP “M3GAN“). Scott Derrickson’s “The Black Phone“ was a big enough hit in 2022 that a sequel was probably inevitable. However, given that it ends with the definite death of its villain, The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), and no real hanging story threads, what would a sequel be?
“Black Phone 2“ takes place in 1982, four years after the events of the first film. Finney (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) are making their way through high school while still feeling the after-effects of Finn’s harrowing ordeal with The Grabber. Finn, who constantly gets into fights at school, is self-medicating with weed in an attempt to forget what happened. Gwen, meanwhile, still has her dark visions, but they’ve gotten so strong that she’s started sleepwalking during them. One of her visions leads her to the phone in The Grabber’s old basement, where she receives a call from the past: Her dead mother, who also had visions similar to Gwen’s, calling from Alpine Lake Youth Camp because she saw the phone number carved into ice in a vision of her own. Having been tormented by visions of young boys being killed and scratching letters into ice from below, Gwen decides that she must go to Alpine Lake, under the guise of being a counselor-in-training, and figure out how to put these boys’ spirits to rest. Finn and his dead best friend Robin’s brother, Ernesto (Miguel Mora), go with her, only to get caught in a blizzard that shuts down the camp before anyone else arrives, leaving them alone with camp owner Armando (Demián Bichir), his daughter Mustang (Arianna Rivas), and office staff Kenneth (Graham Abbey) and Barbara (Maev Beaty). But everyone at Alpine Lake is in danger, for The Grabber is also there, and his spirit is powerful enough to reach out from the spiritual plane where Gwen sees her visions into the real world, with violent consequences. Can Gwen and Finn figure out how to stop him before he gets his revenge by killing them both?
Derrickson and co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill go to great lengths to justify this film’s existence with links to the first film. The introduction of Finn and Gwen’s mother feels particularly egregious; an overindulgent bit of interconnectedness that reeks of desperation. However, even if the foundation is a bit rotted, Derrickson builds an impressive contraption on top of it, keeping his focus squarely on Finn and Gwen and how they’re coping (or not) with their past. The setup of this film’s story definitely feels less organic than the first, but what Derrickson and company do with that setup works surprisingly well. While their mother may feel shoehorned in, the emotional response her involvement brings about in Finn and Gwen is well-earned and pays dividends by the end. Similarly, The Grabber’s reappearance doesn’t really feel like a natural extension of the first film. Still, it doesn’t break the rules the first film set up, and the film has a lot of fun with the “Nightmare on Elm Street”-style interplay between the real and dream worlds that was only barely hinted at previously. Elsewhere, Derrickson amps up his clever direction of the first film by using different grades of film grain to differentiate between Gwen’s dreams and her sleepwalking visions, and employing a wide range of audio tricks to add texture to the film’s soundscape. He often mistakes loudness for scariness, dialing up Atticus Derrickson’s score to unbearably high levels to intensify the film’s scares. This added intensity doesn’t actually make those scenes any scarier; it just makes them more unsettling at most. Derrickson seems to prize general atmosphere over specific scares, and effectively infuses the film with plenty of shivery elements that make you feel the icy bite of its wintry setting.
It also helps that Thames and McGraw have had a couple of years to mature since the first film. Neither held back last time, but their performances here feel stronger in every possible way. They both have deeper wells of feeling to draw from this time, and since their character arcs are more nuanced here, that’s an invaluable asset. McGraw in particular surpasses her work in the previous film by leaps and bounds, shading Gwen’s paralysis in her sleepwalking state so that her inaction is never solely rooted in fear. Thames likewise brings different shades to Finn’s emotions about what he’s been through, always capturing the mixed feelings of terror, anger, sadness, and bone-deep depression that come in the wake of trauma. He’s trying to repress what happened, along with his feelings about it, but is having trouble doing so, which Thames expresses in impactful ways.
While it remains a slight disappointment that Hawke’s fabulously expressive face is completely covered up for most of the film (major props to the makeup team for what’s revealed underneath the mask this time), his superbly sinister vocal work once again proves invaluable to the film’s success. Hawke’s barely contained glee at getting to play such a purely evil, fantastical character transfers over to The Grabber, giving the character a sick kick that makes him all the more haunting. While the film overall prefers unsettling atmosphere to jump scares, Hawke’s performance finds the perfect middle ground between those two modes of horror, providing both popcorn thrills and artfully executed slow-burn terror. Derrickson may not be able to fuse those two modes together throughout the film as successfully as Hawke does in his performance. Still, he manages to do so effectively on an individual level. Gwen’s dreams are gorgeously grainy exercises in steadily rising tension, while the film’s climax proves fist-pumpingly crowd-pleasing as any mainstream blockbuster. It’s easy to wish “Black Phone 2“ came together better, but you can’t deny that all the film’s individual elements are quite strong. It will chill you to the bone while watching, but it won’t haunt you for too long afterward.
