The sequel to The Black Phone is an enjoyable little chiller, but awkwardly justifies its own existence.
Four years on from the events of 2021’s The Black Phone, the shadow of The Grabber still looms over the lives of hard luck siblings Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) Blake. Finn, having grown into a hardknuckle teen as so many sensitive boys do, has to regularly pound someone into paste at high school should they make something of the fact that he absolutely murdered the serial killer who kidnapped him. Psychic younger sister Gwen, taking centre stage here, is investigating both Christianity and the possibility of a date with dorky charmer Ernesto (Miguel Mora playing the younger brother of his character in the first film).
Teen drama gets interrupted by terror when she starts having ominous dreams about another stretch of murders by Ethan Hawke‘s late Grabber, and payphones start ringing only for him as he walks past. Clues point to a Christian summer camp up in the Colorado Rockies where their late mother once worked. And so the pair, with smitten but steadfast Ernesto in tow, set off to investigate.
The Black Phone is a tight, mean, deeply satisfying adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story of the same name. It never struck me as a film crying out for a sequel, though. It’s notably self-contained and ends on an absolute exclamation point of a climax that seemed to put paid to any notion of a follow up. And while Black Phone 2 is a fun time and horror fans will dig what Cargill and Derrickson are putting together here for the most part, the film’s issues largely stem from trying to square the circle of having the Grabber appear post-mortem.
Which isn’t beyond the pale in a series that has established supernatural phenomena, but Black Phone 2 struggles with sequel syndrome. Call it Freddification – like the villain of A Nightmare On Elm Street, this iteration of the Grabber attacks people in their dreams. We get some cool sequences of wounds spontaneously appearing on bodies as the masked murderer puts them through the wringer while they’re asleep. There’s also a touch of Jasonification – we are, after all, at a holiday camp being menaced by a seemingly unstoppable supernatural killer. It’s a hell of a power up for a character who was just a mundane but exceedingly creepy serial killer, but speaks to the inherent challenges of extending a one off into what is clearly meant to be an ongoing franchise.
Which is fine – there’s nothing wrong with playing to the tropes if the tropes pay off, and Derrickson gets a lot of moody atmosphere out of the film’s wintry setting, while Hawke is still having a ball as the Grabber, who now comes equipped to tell our heroes what’s waiting for them on the other side of death (it ain’t great, but there’s an escape hatch of sorts).
I can’t buy that Finn and Gwen are still trying to figure out the true identity of the Grabber, though. If your memory’s fuzzy, Finn was imprisoned in the basement of the Grabber’s brother’s house, said brother (five star character actor James Ransone, who gets a brief cameo this time around) eventually also getting murdered by his crazy kin. I can believe in a serial killer returning from the grave to terrorise the ones that got away, sure. I can’t believe that every element of the case wasn’t tabloid fodder for days. The connection between the Grabber and our protagonists’ mother, surely easily discovered by anyone willing to do the legwork, is a key plot point here, and it doesn’t pass the pub test.
Which sounds nitpicky, but for all its uncanny occurrences, its ghostly kids and its malevolent monster, The Black Phone works, like a lot of Joe Hill’s stuff and certainly his old man’s, because it’s grounded in a recognisable, everyday reality. Black Phone 2, by contrast, eschews that verisimilitude at will, and it bugs me.
It’s not a dealbreaker, though, just a few marks off for sloppy reasoning. Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw remain eminently watchable, and I love how their characters have developed in the four year gap between films – Thomas in particular is revelatory in the way he depicts Finn’s transformation into a moody young man. Demián Bichir shows up as ex-con camp supervisor Armando, bringing effortless gravitas to the role. And Hawke, one of the best actors currently working, is wonderfully upsetting as our villain. There’s plenty of fun to be found here.
So, Black Phone 2 is a step down, sure, but not a big one. It’s a solid little crowd-pleaser of a horror film, but not the instant classic that the first film was.
Black Phone 2 is in cinemas from October 16.
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