Black Phone 2 review: Gripping sequel embraces gruesomeness and the paranormal
Ethan Hawke returns as the Grabber in Scott Derrickson's follow-up to his 2022 horror film.
After watching race-against-time retro-horror The Black Phone (2022), you may wonder how a sequel is possible. Ethan Hawke’s prolific, masked child-killer “The Grabber” had been “dispatched” by latest teenage victim Finney (Mason Thames), thanks to supernatural aid from a phone line to the ghosts of the dead, helpfully situated in the boy’s soundproofed basement prison.
However, when it comes to movie monsters and celluloid serial killers, it’s hard to keep a “good” fiend down, especially if a low-budget flick is a box-office hit (over $160 million worldwide).
After all, the slasher antics of the likes of Michael Myers (Halloween), Jason Vorhees (Friday the 13th), Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Ghostface (Scream) spawned lucrative long-running franchises, if with diminishing critical returns.
However, writer/director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C Robert Cargill have upped the supernatural ante for the sequel with ghoulish and gory aplomb. They achieve this by taking the original film’s characters (and cast) out of small-town suburbia and stranding them at an isolated, blizzard-hit Christian youth camp where boys had vanished mysteriously back in the 1950s.
It’s 1982, four years after Finney escaped from becoming another grim statistic, but his ordeal has left him traumatised and prone to violence, much like his alcoholic dad (Jeremy Davies) became after the suicide of Finney’s mother. Meanwhile, younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose dreams helped to save her sibling in 1978, is finding her psychic ability (inherited from mum) more of a curse than a gift, and is sleepwalking around town not knowing what is real, a nightmare or a prophetic vision.
Indeed, it's a dream about a frozen lake – and its mutilated ghostly denizens – that inspires Gwen, Ernesto (younger brother of a Grabber victim) and Finney — numbing himself with smoking weed in the hope he’ll stop receiving phone calls from beyond — to go to Alpine Lake Camp.
Once there, however, the trio are snowed in with camp supervisor Armando (Demián Bechir), his niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas) and a couple of devout Christian helpers, who don’t take too kindly to Gwen’s expletive-laden tirades (a hilarious tonic to the increasingly oppressive atmosphere).
It’s then that the beyond-the-grave evil of the Grabber (Ethan Hawke, back behind the mask) starts to rear its ugly head, generating bloody real-world consequences, especially for Gwen — now the killer’s main prey — who discovers getting wounded while asleep is no protection to actual harm.
Of course, horror fans will spot allusions to all sorts of fright flicks, whether it’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th, Poltergeist or The Shining. But Derrickson is navigating his own creepy groove here, sustained by Thames and McGraw, who have literally grown into their roles and deliver emotionally compelling performances as they struggle to process their own personal angst, whether it’s Finney’s survivor guilt or Gwen’s fear she will end up like her mother, all the while trying to survive the Grabber’s nefarious, ever-deadly telekinetic attacks.
The first Black Phone was a serial-killer horror with a side order of supernatural, but this gripping sequel embraces the paranormal and gruesomeness in all its gory glory, too. Meanwhile the dream sequences, seemingly shot on scratchy 70s film stock and recalling Derrickson’s 2012 spine-chiller Sinister, ooze unsettling menace and deliver some hearty jump-scares.
Black Phone 2 is now showing in UK cinemas.
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