BLACK PHONE 2 (2025)

In theaters now from Universal Pictures and BlumHouse!
Directed by Scott Derrickson.
Written by C. Robert Cargill, Scott Derrickson, from a short story by Joe Hill.
Check out the trailer here!!

Set a few years after Finn (played by Temu Brad Renfro aka Mason Thames) escaped from the clutches of the Grabber (Ethan Hawke), he is still trying to deal with the trauma of his abduction, which ended in the gruesome death of the Grabber. Now 17, Finn is still having nightmares, gets calls from the dead which he ignores, and tries to block it all out with weed. His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) aided in Finn’s rescue with her own para-psychic powers and is now having dreams where she is in contact with her dead mother Hope (played by FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES’ Anna Lore) and three dead children who seem to be the first victims of the Grabber. Both Finn and Gwen are led to a Christian Youth Camp in the Colorado mountains, where a mysterious broken phone booth provides a main line to the Grabber from hell.

The first hour of BLACK PHONE 2 tries really hard to justify why there is a sequel in the first place and it’s with this type of motivation that Derrickson and Cargill do their best work on the film. They do a good job of refreshing the audience with the horrors Finn endured and how he is trying to cope with it, all the while elevating Gwen’s role and developing her character. In doing so, this BLACK PHONE world is fleshed out and made all the more dangerous. They intermix the drama with some really solid scares and atmospheric moments. One stylistic choice that was used in this filmmaking duos previous film SINISTER, the implementation of Super 8 camera stock paired with the whirring of the camera, is also used in BLACK PHONE 2 to indicate that those scenes are occurring in a dream. While this isn’t a new technique, it is an effective one to help distinguish between Gwen’s dream world and the waking one. During these scenes, the detail is softened, and the lights are blown out, making the edges of the setting fuzzy, as if you are really attempting to focus in the midst of a dream.

BLACK PHONE 2 still bathes in that retro-wave of the 80’s, though it is not as prevalent here as the first one. We get some 80’s style clothes and NIGHT FLIGHT playing obscure 80’s videos, but basically this is a way for the film to exist in a time before cellphones came along and saved everything. Derrickson really knocks the atmosphere out of the park in this first hour as well with the chilly outside filled with tremendous winds and flurries, contrasted with the insides of the cabins which are lit with warm red heaters with almost neon zigzag lines. We are no longer in that horrible basement from the first one, but the setting factors in greatly into the story, making you pull up your collar in some outdoor scenes or unbutton it when we get up close with these characters.

Unfortunately, that’s where the problems begin. I noticed this about halfway through the film. For a film set in the cold mountains of Colorado with snow drifts, high winds, and lakes frozen solid, no one is cold in this movie. These kids run around without hats and coats. There’s barely a shiver or frosty breath seen from anyone in the cast. I know that Colorado cold is much worse than the Chicago cold I endure every year, but cold is fucking cold and one would think with snow and ice being much more of a factor in this movie, the reaction to that cold would have been highlighted a bit more. Hell, Jeremy Davies (who returns later in the film) falls through the ice in one scene and then just shakes it off and isn’t seen until much later and it seems like he’s still wet and just standing around in sopping clothes, dripping…during the nighttime…in foot deep snow!

But where BLACK PHONE really skids to a screeching halt is the halfway point right after the group at the Children’s camp witness Gwen’s battle with the Grabber where she is flying around the room in her sleep a la Tina’s death in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The entire group gather in a lodge to discuss what is happening and basically catch everyone up on who everyone is, what is going on, and what they need to do next. It is an exposition dump the likes I haven’t seen in ages and something Cargill as a reviewer from Ain’t It Cool News back in the day would have pointed out as writing blasphemy. There had to be some way for this information to have been communicated via action, not told to us via dialog. On top of that, some mighty leaps in logic are made from Gwen’s character who, through her budding psychic powers and vague dreams, is somehow able to piece together not only the Grabber’s motivations, but his weaknesses as well. These conclusions are leapt to and because the plot needs it to be true, it’s accurate! But it also leads me to question why the Grabber leads Finn and Gwen to the camp when it is the same place that holds the seeds of his weakness? But I guess we aren’t supposed to ask these questions.

BLACK PHONE 2 then goes on a bit with some more frosty spookiness and almost gets its groove back, only to once again slam on the momentum breaks again at the hour and a half mark so Finn, Gwen and their father (played by the ever-amazing Jeremy Davies) stand in the cold and have a heartfelt moment that I guess is to once again repeat the recap to Davies for the cheapest of seats in the theater or for the couple who entered the movie theater I saw it in at the hour and fifteen mark, obviously taking in a second or third feature at the theater that afternoon. Again, this second exposition dump could have been factored in through action or better yet, not included at all and as with THE SHINING, which is one of many films BLACK PHONE 2 borrows heavily from, where the plow truck comes in late in the movie only for the driver to be killed, upping the stakes elevenfold.

But that doesn’t happen and I guess we are getting into spoilers here, so beware, but no one, other than the kids who are killed in the past and the Grabber himself, is actually killed in BLACK PHONE 2. The climax has the entire cast gathering on the icy lake to confront the Grabber both in the dream world and the real one. The script tries to give all of them something to do, but as the action goes on, most of them are simply standing around while Finn and Gwen take on the Grabber. There’s literally a scene where one kid (played by Miguel Mora), who apparently was played by the same kid in the first BLACK PHONE and is now playing his brother in this one, simply is watching the action going down while sitting next to a sleeping Gwen. Meanwhile, Gwen is thrashing around in her sleep and Finn is fighting an invisible enemy on the ice and this dude is just sitting there. Some of these standarounders needed to be killed off and this problem wouldn’t have been so prevalent.

The focus in BLACK PHONE 2 is all over the place. I understand expanding the roles of those who survived the first one, but this should have been a story about Finn overcoming his trauma or at least finding a way to deal with it in a positive way. There is a section of the film where he gets a fatherly lecture from Damian Bachir (who is in this cast simply to add some grrrrravitas and maybe a cast member who actually remembers the eighties) and then the second exposition drop confronts Finn’s attempts to cover up his problems, but for the most part, this plot if pushed aside in the second half in favor of Gwen’s story where she comes to grips with her new powers and has some closure with her mother. As with the large amount of characters surviving, leading to a crowded climax, the plot is overcrowded with two focuses going in their own directions and never really meeting, kind of like the cock-eyed gaze of Pennywise.

Who’s to blame for this mess? Not, Derrickson and Cargill. Both have said they really didn’t want to do a second BLACK PHONE movie, but after a suggestion from Joe Hill and I’m sure a backed-up cash truck from BlumHouse, they decided to give it a go. The result is one solid hour of good in a two-hour movie. Nope. I blame Blumhouse. What was once a promising company producing cutting edge horror, is now sharting schlock with the dullest of blades. I have come to the conclusion that BlumHouse is the go-to production house for people who haven’t seen a lot of horror movies. Sure, there are elements of good stuff here, but all of them have been done before in better movies. BLACK PHONE is a stew made of uncooked and unblended parts of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, THE SHINING (with the snowy setting and one scene with blood pouring from a tree stump), CURTAINS (as it swipes directly from the ice-skating killer sequence), THE SIXTH SENSE (with the communication with dead people) all set at Crystal Lake in the winter time. It’s that derivative. The whole film feels like an audition tape for Derrickson and Cardill to be the frontrunners of a new A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movie. Out of all of the cinematic swipes and lifts, BLACK PHONE fills its pockets with entire scenes from the ELM STREET series. But BlumHouse counts on those who go to the theaters haven’t seen those ancient movies like ELM STREET or CURTAINS or THE SIXTH SENSE or THE SHINING.

In the end, BLACK PHONE 2 feels like an unnecessary sequel to be kind and rushed and sloppy to be more accurate. Sure, Hawke is great as the Grabber and I admire that he doesn’t have the ego to force a face reveal every five minutes. Back in the days of oldy olden times, masked monsters kept their makeup on. Karloff’s Monster and Mummy, Lugosi’s Dracula, even Hodder’s Jason or for the most part Englund’s Freddy owned their monstrous roles. Can you imagine Lon Cheyney Sr. picking his makeup off in PHANTOM OF THE OPERA like Downey and Holland demasking every five minutes in the Marvel films? So good on Hawke for owning the role and making it iconic without a sparkly face.

Still, the movie around Hawke’s performance is flawed enormously. If there is a BLACK PHONE 3, I hope more time is put into the script and less time is spent explaining it and swiping elements of the classics. I feel like I was hard on this movie, but I think it deserves it, as I liked the original quite a bit. But aside from a promising first hour of setup, BLACK PHONE 2 was a huge letdown.