‘BLACK PHONE 2’ Doesn’t Phone It In, But Still Misses the Call

Black Phone 2, a snowy and sentimental spooky sequel from Scott Derrickson, is a mixed bag of horror do’s and don’ts. Set three years after the events of the first film, where kidnapped child captive Finney fought and killed a serial child murderer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) by communicating with his deceased victims through a kind of supernatural apparatus, i.e., a black phone, the sequel picks up with more messages from the great beyond. Derrickson’s followup is thoughtful and meditative in places, well-acted in others, shoddily written here and there, full of stylistic choices but light on actual scares: a menagerie of successes and shortcomings stuffed into one haunted receiver.

The pacing is off from the jump. The first hour drags mercilessly, and we don’t get so much as a fleeting glimpse of the movie’s heavy. By the time things finally do seem to pick up steam, they’re rushing to the finish. The first act reacquaints us with an older Finney (Mason Thames) and his younger sister Gwen (Madeline McGraw) now teenagers trying to live in the aftermath of trauma. Finney picks fights at school to look tough and smokes joints behind dad’s back to stay calm. Gwen is a little more composed but haunted (literally) by increasingly vivid and disturbing dreams. These dreams take place at a snow-covered Christian winter camp, a setting her mom once worked at, where (of course) three boys died under mysterious circumstances. The dream sequences are shot in a grainy, ’80s-style VHS aesthetic, which is a genuinely cool stylistic touch, a smart way to distinguish the dreamworld from reality.

When Gwen starts to piece together that her mother may be calling out from beyond the grave to help her solve the mystery of those murdered boys, she ropes Finney into a ghost-hunting mission to the camp. There she’s joined by her doting friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora), camp counselor Armando (Demián Bichir) and a collection of thinly written supporting characters that manage to slip a few laughs into the proceedings. Unsurprisingly, the Grabber is somehow still involved, his web wrapped tighter around their family than anyone previously dreamt of.

The set up isn’t bad, at least by slasher sequel standards. The script from Derrickson and co-writer Christopher Robert Cargill is more ambitious than a simple retread, trying to expand the mythology and tie the ghostly happenings deeper into the family’s personal history. This kind of revisionist connective tissue is par for the course in horror franchises – some do it well, others less so – and Black Phone 2 mostly gets away with it. The problem isn’t the ambition or even the tone, which mostly balances its supernatural elements with grounded emotion and a few genuinely funny moments; the real issue is the pacing. It takes too long to get going and often feels like it’s spinning its wheels.

Shifting the primary character POV from Finney to Gwen proves a solid move as McGraw delivers an empathetic, grounded performance that often outpaces the movie around her. She handles the film’s shifts between drama and comedy with more ease than most, selling even the clunkier dialogue with surprising conviction. Unfortunately, the scares just aren’t there. Hawke’s Grabber is effective but used too sparingly throughout. He’s either hidden behind masks, buried in prosthetics, or floating around in dream sequences. When he is unleashed, it feels like we still don’t have enough time or tension to really let the dread build. There’s some gory imagery involving kids getting diced, sliced, and burned, but it’s more upsetting than it is frightening. The film goes for atmospheric unease, but even that only gets it so far. A camp in winter is a nice subversion on the genre’s overplayed summer camp setting, but the storytelling never manages to also flip the script on genre tropes in any meaningful way.

There are flashes of a better movie in here – one that digs into familial grief, inherited trauma, or the afterlife as memory space – but what we get is surface-level. Too many of the characters are just plot delivery systems, spitting out exposition or stating their feelings aloud in monologue-lite fashion. For a genre built on suggestion and subtext, this one prefers to explain itself in full paragraphs. It’s more tell than show, and that tends to get exhausting. In too many moments, I felt like Gwen: shake me awake when it’s over.

Ethan Hawke still delivers as the Grabber, but his presence is too limited to let his menace bloom into something truly nightmarish. There’s potential inherent in the story making him a dream-haunting entity à la Freddy Krueger reaching out from beyond the grave, but the film never pushes the idea far enough. It ends up feeling more like a knockoff than a fresh riff. And unlike Nightmare on Elm Street, which reveled in its surrealism and invention, Black Phone 2 plays everything too straight to get weird, and too safe to get truly scary.

Derrickson’s direction is never less than competent. The film looks good. It feels cold but also – to its detriment – leaves you cold. There’s an effort here to lean more sentimental, to deepen character arcs and family bonds, but that angle can’t compensate for the mid-range supernatural horror taking place around it. While Black Phone 2 angles to phone in supernatural horror with a heart, Derrickson is no Del Toro and his efforts land with more thud than thunder. Though I doubt this franchise will prove it has the creative juices to keep going, though horror has a habit of resurrecting its villains when the box office says so, if this is the end of the line for the black phone, it’s a just fine final call but one that probably could have been sent straight to voicemail.

CONCLUSION: A cold horror movie in more ways than one, ‘Black Phone 2’ is disturbing in flashes and occasionally satisfying, with a standout turn from Madeline McGraw. But its sluggish pacing and lack of genuine scares make this a call you don’t need to answer.