When a horror movie hits, a sequel usually follows very closely. The Black Phone was a critical and commercial success in 2021, so it’s surprising it’s taken four years for a follow-up. That wait, though, turns out to be a very smart move. Four years have also passed in Black Phone 2’s reality.
That time has not healed Finn and his sister Gwen (again played by Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw). In the original, 13-year-old Finn was kidnapped by serial child-killer ‘The Grabber’ (Ethan Hawke) and kept in a basement, awaiting execution. Finn bested the killer with the help of past victims, who contacted him by phone from beyond the grave, and his sister’s peculiar premonitions.
Finn’s trauma has curdled into aggression and a class-B drug habit, which he hopes will blur his constant terror. The once confident Gwen is rattled by her unwanted psychic powers. The Grabber is dead but his hold on their lives hasn’t weakened. When Gwen starts getting nighttime visits from murdered boys, she and Finn take jobs in a remote, snowy camp, to find out why dead children are guiding them there.
Finn and Gwen’s damage is the most successful part of the film. Now on the edge of young adulthood, they seem to have lost the spirit that carried them through a hard childhood. They survived, but they’re deadened. Where most horror teens bounce back to happiness swiftly, these two are trying to claw their way to, at best, normalcy.
The Grabber lacks the snappy backstory or firm rules of a Jason or Freddy
As a horror, it’s not as strong. The tone is peculiar. The Friday the 13th-esque camp setting, and allusions to other 80s horror classics like A Nightmare On Elm Street, The Thing and The Shining suggests a playful intent. And the return of the Grabber, as a ghost who has escaped Hell because he simply must wreak more terror, is goofy. Yet it’s also often even more bleak than last time. It’s hard to enjoy the silliness of an ice-skating monster while also enduring the sight of someone stepping in the bloody entrails of a barbecued child.
The first film had plenty of plot holes and inconsistencies, but Scott Derrickson directed it so sharply that they were easy to ignore. It was a tense, tight escape-room horror. The sequel is less trim, with a broader plot and slower momentum, which exposes the thinness of the conceit. In the original, it didn’t matter that the Grabber had little substance. He just needed to be a menace standing between Finn and freedom. Here, as the plot tries to build his mythology, he’s wispy, without the snappy backstory or firm rules of a Jason or Freddy. There’s time to question how he operates, which saps him of menace.
There’s still plenty here to make you shiver, but in letting events out of the basement this sequel has also released much of the tension.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Oct 17.