Black Phone 2: Movie Review

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, Demian Bechir
Director: Scott Derrickson

If you're looking for a film that mixes Nightmare on Elm Street with a Friday the 13th style bad guy and setting in a camp near a lake, then Black Phone 2 should be checking all of your boxes with ease.

In this sequel to the 2021 horror film, the big question is what to do with Ethan Hawke's serial killer The Grabber who was offed in the first flick's finale.

The answer? Make him appear as a nightmarish vision made real and amp up the psychological impact being kidnapped would have on your victim and his family. It's no mean feat, but the bleak and at times, downright nasty Black Phone 2 (who would ever be a Christian facing off against a devilish figure here is a valid question) certainly has a way of inveigling its way under your skin.

Four years after escaping the Grabber's greasy clutches, Finney (Mason Thames) is struggling to cope. Reduced to smoking pot and waling on those who mock him for killing a serial killer, he's a mess. Things are further complicated when his sister Gwen starts having visions of being contacted by their dead mother from a camp high in the Rocky mountains and also seeing dead children.

Determined to slay their demons once and for all, the pair head to the camp for one more showdown.

Black Phone 2 works despite its derivative origins and the feeling there was nowhere else to go after the first.

Fashioning a backstory is always dangerous for a seemingly one-shot serial killer, but there's genuine nightmare fuel here, thanks to distorted imagery, discordant soundtracks and some very unsettling imagery and philosophies.

When the Grabber details to Gwen what hell is like and how it strips away all of the humanity, leaving only the sin to fester, it's upsetting stuff delivered with both pain and torture by Ethan Hawke, who once again excels in the less is more approach.

Equally, with a bleak outlook and set mostly at night (or in the twilight hours), the nightmares which play out in that dreamland that any insomniac will be familiar with leads to some haunting imagery. Turning sleepwalking into a kind of 1980s videotape fuzzy vibe also helps with a film that really does have a way of dialling up the creepy edges.

There's an argument that this is anti-Christian in some ways (a child killer at a Christian camp, the way it treats two evangelists) but that aside, this is a largely excellent film that makes great fist of its small clutch of cast.

Packed with tension and unease, upset and disturbing imagery, Black Phone 2 builds on the legacy of the first and unfurls a truly upsetting story that works from its directing restraint and because it taps into many ideas many of us secretly can't shake in the small hours of the morning.