The Black Phone 2 -- a review

The Black Phone was a horror movie that was based on author Joe Hill’s short story about a boy held captive by a killer in his basement who receives messages from the killer’s deceased victims over an old, broken phone. I thought The Black Phone was very well done, having been smartly directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister, the first Doctor Strange), but, seeing how TBP ended, I never figured a sequel would be on the horizon--at least until last year. I follow Derrickson’s writing collaborator, C. Robert Cargill, on social media, and it was from Cargill that I first learned about The Black Phone 2 being brought to life.

The Black Phone 2 originally started as an idea from Joe Hill (who’s the son of Stephen King), and Derrickson and Cargill quickly turned it into a movie, with filming running from late 2024 into early 2025. Taking place in 1982, four years after the events of the first film, Mason Thames returns as Finney, who escaped the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in the first film by killing him. His younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) is suffering from traumatic nightmares that appear to be created by the Grabber, who is now stalking the kids from beyond the grave. Both Thames and McGraw are superb here.

One might be tempted to disregard TBP2 as being a rip-off of A Nightmare On Elm Street. And while the storylines may seem the same on the surface, the execution in The Black Phone 2 is completely different, and much better. The siblings and their friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora), whose older brother was a victim of the Grabber, attend a winter kids camp in the hopes of scoring counselor jobs, only to wind up getting trapped there by a massive winter storm. There are no kids with them, just the bare bones staff, led by the engaging Armando (Demian Bichir) and his niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas).

Using this desolate wintry setting to great effect, Derrickson and Cargill manage to make The Black Phone 2 intensely scary and moody. The script is also razor smart, producing some truly frightening scares without having their characters do stupid things just to advance the plot. The driving force here is vengeance, as the Grabber himself states, and Ethan Hawke’s performance, done entirely behind a mask, is marvelously menacing. Finney and Gwen’s whole motivation is just staying alive--until they realize they have to fight back. The Black Phone 2 is an intelligent supernatural horror film that catches the delicate balancing act of taking the story seriously, while still having some humor. It winds up being a very satisfying sequel that’s even better than the original. --SF

The Black Phone 2 is on streaming, and is also available on physical media. It's not for young children, as it contains gore and cursing.