BLACK PHONE 2
2025
Directed by Scott Derrickson
Written by C. Robert Cargill and Scott Derrickson
Spoilers: moderate (though I make some implications that could, conceivably, be construed as "high" spoilers)
As one who was by no means down, but not nearly as up as some, on 2022's The Black Phone, I had managed (maybe a little counter-intuitively) to be pretty optimistic about its sequel, and I'd even developed some hopes that The Black Phone would become a more valuable thing in its sequel's context: there just aren't that many slasher franchises (not that Black Phone 2 is a slasher, but through no fault of my own—we'll get to it!—I'd kind of got it into my head, "this is a slasher franchise now") that get to have that particular kind of first film; I don't mean self-contained, because "self-contained" is par for the course and almost invariable for slasher series, but a first film that's basically not in the genre at all, but gets to give a slasher villain an origin story, tantamount to an unintended prequel, that's still entirely organic and indebted only to itself, not locked down to making sense out of its own lore, and concerned solely with telling a story (or adapting a Joe Hill story) worth telling in its own right, that nonetheless could serve (and now, going by the box office, has served) as the basis for a much more potentially-expansive horror franchise. Of course, I'm also talking about The Black Phone, which by my lights already did lock itself down to a bunch of lore that it had to make sense of, so I could also say that now that The Black Phone already awkwardly set up its general milieu of psychic children (Joe Hill is Stephen King's son, lest it ever be forgot, but then I'm apprised that Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill actually added the Kingesque "psychic children" material, so maybe I owe Hill an apology) and, more awkwardly still, the particular powersets of its particular psychic children, its sequel would not need to do that, and I do think that's still true, it didn't really need to. At absolute bottom, though, it's just clever in its inevitability, you know? Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) is a kid that sees dead people, which got him out of his jam with his child-kidnapping serial killer adversary, the Grabber (Ethan Hawke), but in his escape, he killed the Grabber, sooooo...
We start in the past (that is, further in the past, the 1950s, rather than the 1982 of this sequel to a film set in 1978), where a young woman (Anna Lore) is placing a call in a phone booth on the edge of what they've made to look like a digitally composited postcard of a frozen lake for some reason, even though I guess I have some reason to believe it's a real landscape in Ontario (subbing in for Colorado for climatic and, doubtless, financial reasons); the other party to this initially-confusing conversation is clarified early enough (maybe too early for mystery's sake) that I think it's probably okay to say it's just whom you probably thought it was, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), Finney's sister, who has the dream skills Nancy Thompson wishes she'd had, and was the other key to Finney's escape from the Grabber's dungeon. They have, in fact, been navigating the aftermath of Finney's experience less well than the ending of The Black Phone suggested, because now that a sequel's here, we will have to be dealing with Trauma, because that's easy and apparently society expects it even though it makes horror movies dour and glum—hence the reversal of Finney's introduction last time, where we find him in another fight except now he's the one kicking ass over a perceived slight and taking it way too far—but, in fairness, there's beginning to be a fair amount of indication that Finney's feeling that the Grabber's still out there somewhere isn't just in his head, and that the phone calls on dead lines he still receives aren't always going to be from some harmless dead child. (Black Phone 2 makes a credible go at integrating franchise iconography that never intended to be franchise iconography—because evidently any and all Black Phone films must entail haunted phone calls, because otherwise how could we call it Black Phone, huh?—without making it feel too awfully forced.)
Gwen, having figured out the where (and the when) of her dream conversation, contrives to rope Finney into her plan to answer the call, and despite a great deal of reluctance to be sucked back into the supernatural, he accedes to go off to Alpine Lake Camp with Gwen, who's already tapped her quasi-boyfriend Ernesto for the ride (this would be Miguel Mora, back from the first film but playing the younger brother of his didn't-make-it character, who's now a little older than that character was, and who has a completely distinctive personality—Ernesto is a dweeb—which is altogether a pretty canny way to keep the first film's cast together, even if I sort of do not like Ernesto, or think he adds very much, even as an object to threaten Gwen with). Anyway, they get there, barely, finding it almost abandoned (some staff remain, but they're the only counselors who even showed up) thanks to a raging snowstorm. And soon the mystery begins to resolve itself: it involves the ghosts of children long-since dead, the Grabber's very first victims, lost somewhere amongst these inhospitable and icy mountains, who have, since the Grabber's crossing over into the great beyond, become a source of power for him, the latent shine-like abilities we might've suspected he possessed in life allowing him to return to the land of the living, or at least affect its still-alive inhabitants, especially with Gwen's dreams holding a door open for him, though her powers are the only way the Shaws are going to be able to beat an enemy that they can't just kill anymore.
Now, this is more-or-less good stuff—this one's predominantly Gwen's movie the way the first one was predominantly Finney's, but whatever else it does or doesn't do, it does succeed in unifying her scenes and Finney's scenes into what actually feels like the same movie, which The Black Phone so signally failed to do—though without going too spoilery into the plot convolutions Derrickson and Cargill's screenplay has decided to take on, it has the unappealing quality of being almost-offensively sound, as a matter of mechanics and continuity, with all its reveals and twists (and even its retcons), but also incredibly obviously contrived, all for no particularly keenly-felt benefit, going all the way around its asshole to get to its elbow, whether by "elbow" you mean "ginned-up emotional stakes and a striking runtime of 114 runtimes that's not even used altogether well otherwise," or if you just mean "a fucking winter break camp." We have basically the same movie, with the same strengths, if Gwen and Finney just... went to Alpine Lake? Because it is, indeed, very plausible that a couple of teens in the 1980s would have taken on some counselor jobs at a winter camp, and that concept doesn't really need this amount of plot scaffolding, let alone mythos-building, to get there? (The one "emotions now!" scene I really liked could happen either way.) But, after all, most of what Derrickson and Cargill are after is the setting itself, this frozen lake high-up in the Rockies, this utterly snowbound and bitterly wintry environment, somehow wide-open in its big swathes of white and inutterably claustrophobic at the same time, and worse at night.
But then, the remainder of what Derrickson is after—I think Derrickson in particular, though maybe Cargill too, I can't speak to him as readily—is that it's a Christian camp, and less-than-devout Gwen and Finney would need a specific exigence to get there, though obviously it's only a Christian camp because Derrickson has decided it will be. And this is, you know, fine, though Derrickson is way too sanguine about stopping his movie absolutely dead to get to its anodyne Christian/It's About Trauma messaging (principally through Demián Bechir, whose whole career, such as has been visible to me, is playing an extremely boring Christian in horror movies), and Derrickson will stop it even deader than that to assure you that, don't worry, he's a liberal Christian, by way of a moral majority harpy (Maev Baety) that he trots out solely for the task of being a dimension-free cunt for everyone else in the movie, i.e. its director, to dunk on. (He's also sanguine about stopping it for, like, way more exposition than you'd think a sequel would require.) And, you know, despite the disgusting display of The Exorcism of Emily Rose I'd already felt fairly safe in assuming Derrickson's basic political alignment, because if he weren't a liberal Christian, there's a right-wing Christian film industry right there where he'd probably be the most talented single person in the entire field. There's another big weakness (somewhat related, because this is a major form which the dunking on the harpy takes), and this one's a legacy of the first film, now moved right smack into its center: Derrickson and Cargill have decided that the foulmouthed tween whose entire personality was baroque obscenities has not made the slightest stride on that front going on four years, and it just—it's kind of like the following—sucks giant hard horse clit. What was already, to my ears, a pretty annoying fixture of the first film, but one that still felt in McGraw's performance like a natural expression of a precipitous youngster with a good heart but no filter, comes off now like aliens who like South Park are puppeting her mouth: I don't even think, at a fundamental level, McGraw is giving anything like a bad performance here, but a genuinely good performance is simply not possible with this script and this character, so while she's doing everything adroitly as a matter of technique with Gwen's new, somewhat recalibrated parameters—she's growing up awkwardly and is ashamed of her power, because of mean girls or something, and now considers it a curse, though in fairness it does rapidly become something indistinguishable from one—everytime they insert one of those darnedest things a kid will say into this much-older, theoretically-more-mature kid's dialogue, often while she's trying to emote and react around it, often against incredibly (even impossibly!) stressful events, McGraw's performance just straight-up cracks, more "a realtime documentation of agonizing cognitive dissonance" than "an actor inhabiting a character," or even "an actor reciting lines."
On the other hand, or at least, otherwise... this is a better piece of cinema than The Black Phone, which was already playing to Derrickson's strengths as a filmmaker, and it's taking the Sinister influence of Gwen's sequences in The Black Phone and wondering, "what if we just, like, take that all the way and basically make Sinister again with a different starting place." I would not like to overhype that (Sinister is the scariest horror movie I've ever seen, which is not the same as "my favorite horror movie ever," but it's not exactly completely distinct from that, either), but, in practice, what it means is Derrickson leaning even more on his predilection for Super 8 than the last time (apparently Black Phone 2 has set a record for the most Super 8 footage in a wide-release film), and the nearly-automatic sense of eerieness, loss, and the forbidden its splotchy, chunky colors brings out of practically any footage, and which he's obviously very good at putting horrific content into and exploiting those feelings even further. And trapped on top of a mountain in the snow, it's got a whole lot of dismal uneasiness in its aesthetic already, but thanks to Gwen and her visions (which, like before, constitute the justification for the formal switch), it has access to the Super 8 version of that setting whenever it wants, often at the same time the "real" movie is playing. There are some tremendous little horrorfied short art films here, replete with jumpy, "inapt" editing and everything—the corpses of children floating up beneath a lake to scratch messages on its frozen surface, for instance (and countering any repetition, we get it from both perspectives and the child's is naturally even squirmier), or the outright abstraction of an axe sunk into a tree stump that begins to copiously bleed. (They are joined, along with the rest of the movie, though it's never more forceful than in Gwen's bad dreams, by Derrickson's son Atticus on score duties, essentially asked to work along the same lines as Christopher Young on, you guessed, Sinister: I had decided that A. Derrickson's crawling anti-music was already one of the year's best scores before I knew who did it, but if it works, it works, and it works.) But maybe a representative moment of Black Phone 2 operating at its highest capacity, visually, is when Gwen's put alone in the otherwise-empty (and otherwise-meaningless) "girls'" cabin, surrounded by electric resistance heaters already reproducing as a disturbingly smeary dark red glow even in the "regular" photography, and you already know that this is going to look outright monstrous when she enters her dreaming state and the Grabber comes.
Which he inevitably does, and I will say this: Hawke's performance in the first film is significantly more precise; I like this one better. For one thing, Hawke is in the sequel what feels like a hell of a lot more, and I prefer my Hawke in as large a quantity as you can give it to me. It's to some degree doing the opposite work: there's a potential in the first film's Grabber for untethered cosmic evil, which is one way his grubby little serial killer feels horror flick frightening; in this one, he's tethering what has already become a cosmic evil to that "regular" serial killer, now on the cusp of acquiring something like omnipotence over all the victims he could ever ask for even as he still suffers the punishments of hell. (And I know I've slagged on this script a little, but it's never better than when it's great, and it's Hawke describing what hell is from firsthand experience, especially the implication of the particular mechanics of a hell that strips every good memory and everything human away from its inhabitants, but that mechanism seems to have broken down with the Grabber, who retains all his essence because his essence was not human in the first place.) But it's just a performance that gets to be more flamboyant, and maybe only seemingly loose, with Hawke finding a tone of pure hatred for his enemies that isn't even joyful anymore, only compelled; it of course doesn't hurt that it's backed up by the supernatural horror working for the villain this time instead of against him, and of now having good reason to photograph that demon-masked pervert in Super 8, withdrawing like an animate shadow into a fuzzy black swarm of celluloid darkness.
Now, I'd have gone harder on the ice skating than Derrickson, which may be more of a me thing (who wants to see a terrifying Sonja Henie movie? this guy does), and I'm a little perplexed that the now-dead, more-literally-diabolic Grabber isn't allowed to be a little more protean in his visualization (there's a little of this, late in the game), or how Derrickson possibly whiffed on, say, doing jump cuts between the mask expressions that were such a big part of the first film (I could be wrong, but I'm almost positive he doesn't change expressions at all in this one?). But these are quibbles, because the big problem with Black Phone 2 you might actually be able to guess, if you noticed, for example, when I said that Gwen and Finney and Ernesto were the only kids who managed to show up. For all it looks as dangerous as Sinister did, it is emphatically not; this is crazily undangerous for a horror movie that does, after all, still show or at least heavily visually allude to children being fucked up in all kinds of terrible ways, and has Hawke giving that performance. It peaks almost unbelievably early, with a Tina-in-Nightmare-but-now-there's-a-fucking-oven dream-erupts-into-reality masterclass of match-cutting, that definitely doesn't come even halfway through these 114 minutes, and nothing ever feels like it reaches anywhere close to that kind of frenzied animal terror again. And that's where some of my expectations—not entirely fair ones, maybe—did do some damage, though I've already referenced what I thought it would be twice, and being told by quite a number of people that this found The Black Phone swerving into A Nightmare On Elm Street territory tended to stoke those expectations. I don't know what those people are on: this is, in a very generic sense, "like" A Nightmare On Elm Street, though I'm not sure it plays with the dreamstate even as much as Craven's first film, and while it may be reasonable to save the more ornate approach of the Nightmare follow-ups to this film's own sequels, it's not like those at all. But the first Nightmare, especially, felt almost unbearably dangerous, which is why it's a masterpiece, while Black Phone 2 is, I suppose, a well-pedigreed, dark-but-ultimately-harmless kid's adventure movie.
Score: 7/10
P.S.: The original Bell commercial was in 1979, I don't know if I should be annoyed they don't say the thing!
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