Even the icy grip of death can’t keep The Grabber from haunting his victims in Black Phone 2, which premiered at Fantastic Fest last month and opens in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This sequel to the hit 2021 film keeps focus on its central characters while taking the narrative in a new direction, ending up with something that feels like it came from the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.
While not quite as effective as the original The Black Phone, committed performances from its young cast, chilly locations at an isolated Colorado cabin, and eerie 16mm dream sequences keep this one intense and eerie throughout. Blumhouse has been stumbling with their horror films over the past two years—Night Swim, Imaginary, Wolf Man, and M3GAN 2.0 have all been critical and commercial disappointments—but they have a clear hit here.
Black Phone 2 opens in 1982, and Finney (Mason Thames) isn’t exactly adjusting to normal life four years after being kidnapped by The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in the earlier film. Isolated and defensive, he assaults anyone at school who brings up his trauma, and gets through every night with the help of marijuana. In a moment that will immediately ingratiate the film with some viewers, an early scene features Finney watching Night Flight on TV, which happens to be playing a music video for famed internet mystery song Subways of Your Mind.
Younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), meanwhile, is still suffering from vivid nightmares, which are realized by director Scott Derrickson in striking sequences stylized in the form of the 16mm home videos that memorably featured in his Sinister. The filmmaker largely avoids the kind of jump scares that punctuated that film, however, leaving this one with a lingering sense of dread as Gwen’s dream world slowly bleeds into reality.
A ringing phone throughout one of Gwen’s dreams leads her to the central location from the first film: the basement where her brother was held captive. She answers it, and the caller identifies herself as Hope (Anna Lore)—Gwen and Finney’s mother, who died seven years ago, and seems to be calling from much further in the past. Hope is at Alpine Lake, a Christian winter camp deep in the Colorado Mountains, and tells Gwen that she got the number from children who carved it into ice. Gwen, too, has been dreaming about dead boys attempting to communicate from beyond their icy graves.
Against the wishes of her recovering alcoholic father Terrence (Jeremy Davies), Gwen and friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora), brother of one of The Grabber’s victims, head out to the winter camp to volunteer as counselors and follow her mother’s clues. Finney tags along to protect her, but when they get to Alpine Lake, they discover it has been closed due to a heavy snowstorm. Camp supervisor Armando (Demián Bichir) and his niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas) take them in until surrounding roads are plowed—but they are closer to evil than they initially realize.
2021’s The Black Phone was based on a short story by Joe Hill that, like father Stephen King‘s best work, used supernatural elements to accentuate real-world horror. The titular phone, and its connection to another realm, added an unsettling element of the mystery to its narrative, which was otherwise firmly grounded in the terror of a very real masked villain who kidnapped children and kept them captive in his basement.
Black Phone 2, meanwhile, takes things to a more explicitly supernatural realm. The Grabber is no longer real, in a sense, but he’s been resurrected in Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill‘s screenplay as a kind of Freddy Krueger-like figure that haunts our protagonists from the icy depths of the spirit realm. As played by Hawke, he’s just as unsettling this time around (especially when the mask comes off), but the real-world threat he poses isn’t as well established; the rules of the film, in other words, aren’t quite as clear as those in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Early scenes set in the suburbs effectively recreate the feel of early 1980s America, but Black Phone 2‘s chilly central location in the snow-covered Colorado Mountains (played by locations in and around Toronto) is one of its strongest assets, and distinguishes it from the first film. Sound design is also first-rate, with a minimalistic soundtrack by Atticus Derrickson (son of the director) punctuated by extended moments of spine-tingling silence—and a few choice needle drops, including Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall.
While Black Phone 2 doesn’t fully capture the grounded terror of its predecessor, it expands its mythology in chilling new ways, turning trauma and memory into literal ghosts that refuse to rest. Derrickson’s latest sequel does a better job of delivering on the promise of the original than Sinister 2, and audiences answering this call won’t be disappointed. The Grabber himself may be gone—but now its his voice on the other end of the phone.
