The Black Phone 2 is what might happen if A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th had a three-way with Ice Castles — and one of them popped out a baby.
That’s not to say Scott Derrickson’s crisply directed sequel to the 2022 box office hit The Black Phone — once again co-written with C. Robert Cargill, and starring Mason Thames as Finney Blake, Madeleine McGraw as his psychic sister Gwen, and Ethan Hawke as the child-murdering (and probably more) serial killer The Grabber — isn’t a good scary movie. It’s just not as good a scary movie as the first.
The story jumps through hoop after hoop — after motherloving hoop — to justify its premise, considering that The Grabber was very definitely killed by Finney at the conclusion of the first film. And, for the most part, we mindlessly jump through those hoops along with it, ignoring plausibility and leaning into the supernaturalism of it all.
Perhaps the best explanation for the return of The Grabber comes from the killer himself, who tells Finney over a disconnected phone at a snowbound Christian youth camp in the Colorado mountains, “Dead is just a word.” Yeah? So is “eyeroll.”
The thing is, while you’re watching Black Phone 2 under Derrickson’s skillful spell — a director who knows how to imbue a scene with dread and a sensational visual aesthetic, whether through the grainy haze of Super 8 film footage, creating intense unease, or the sight of blood-red feathers settling into a blanket of fluffy white snow — you can’t help but be engaged. He locks you in and whispers, “This is a ghost story. And ghost stories don’t need logic. They just require ghosts.”
And both The Black Phone and its sequel are certainly not lacking in ghosts — from the restless souls of The Grabber’s victims to the killer himself — devil mask still intact, if a little worse for wear.
It’s 1982, four years after the nerve-shattering events of the first film, when Finney was held captive in The Grabber’s sparse, sordid cement basement, receiving calls from previous victims trapped in limbo on a disconnected black rotary phone. Finney and his sister are still coping with the trauma of that encounter, each in their own way: he through pot and violence, she through foul language. The sequel continues their story, building on narrative foundations laid in the first.
This time, however, the film delves more directly into the great beyond — exploring Heaven, Hell, and everything in between — lodging Black Phone 2 in a kind of overtly religious pastiche. Derrickson and Cargill keep poking holes in faith even as they exalt it, eating their cake and gleefully smashing it against the wall.
Ultimately, it’s up to each viewer to decide how to interpret what they’re seeing — at least until the final scene, which pretty much slaughters any ambiguity. Still, The Black Phone 2 deserves credit for attempting to be more layered and complex than most run-of-the-sawmill horror films.
But it never rises to the superb and striking level of the first, which, as a friend recently noted, was extremely well-structured. “Everything clicked into place perfectly,” he said to me over a plate of salt bagels and lox. The first film also had the advantage of placing Finney — and, by extension, us — in a harrowing, unbearable situation.
In The Black Phone 2, the world of the dead intrudes tangibly and horrifically into the world of the living — a concept established in the original — yet there’s nothing as mortifying as the first film’s chilling conversations between Hawke, his voice muffled behind the mask, and Thames’s Finney. Nor is there any moment of pure, devastating anguish — the emotional centerpiece of the original — when the 13-year-old Finney slides down a grimy wall and breaks into tears of resignation that his life will soon end. That scene connects us not only to the boy and his plight, but to the movie itself. It has power.
The Black Phone 2 has no such power. It feels like a sequel that never truly needed to exist. Still, here’s the kicker: when a director is as good as Scott Derrickson, you’d happily watch him film a phone book.
The Black Phone 2 (★★★☆☆) is Rated R and playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
One of modern cinema's foremost champions of stage-to-screen musicals, Bill Condon has enjoyed enviable success as the writer-director of Dreamgirls, director of Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast, and screenwriter of Rob Marshall's blockbuster hit Chicago.
Condon also co-wrote The Greatest Showman, a splashy musical conceived for the screen, now being brought to the stage by Disney. So it's safe to say that, along with the films of Nine and Into the Woods helmer Marshall, Condon's work has largely defined the look and sound of today's movie musicals.
For one brief, deranged moment, I actually considered asking ChatGPT to write a Tron: Ares review for this magazine. What could be more appropriate?
Naturally, I came to my senses. Like the AI in Tron: Ares, ChatGPT wouldn't be offering an actual opinion -- it can't sit in an IMAX theater (yet, I think) -- just a regurgitation of whatever it scraped from the web. And honestly, I couldn't care less what others think about Disney's film series. I only care what I think.
And here's what I think: it's trash. Pretty trash. Gleaming trash. Sleek trash. Trash with a kickass soundtrack. But trash, nonetheless.
Even by the unhinged standards of Stephen King’s wicked imagination, the United States of America envisioned in The Long Walk is one fucked up country. And yet, an American society that makes a contest of sacrificing its sons to gun violence, ostensibly for the sake of the republic, doesn’t fall far outside the realm of future possibilities.
King published the novel in 1979, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, when enlisting contenders from each state into a deadly marathon of endurance, forcing them to keep up the pace or be shot to death by soldiers, must have read as an outlandishly grim metaphor for sending boys to war.
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