‘Black Phone 2’ Is a Mess

Babe, I love a good, unexpected horror sequel, even one with a gross shift in tone. It worked for Orphan and M3GAN, so why not The Black Phone? Well, in another life, it might have, but the follow-up to the spooky, scary first film outing of The Grabber seems to have run so far from its tone that it left behind everything that made it work.

Finney and Gwen (Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw) are still haunted by their narrow escape from The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), albeit in different ways. Finney still carries around a bubbling rage and the sound of a ringing phone, and Gwen remains haunted by vivid dreams that read like messages from another plane. After answering a call on the titular black phone from within her dream, Gwen becomes convinced that The Grabber isn’t quite done and so convinces her brother and romantic interest, Ernesto (Miguel Mora as the younger brother of one of the ghosts that helped Finney escape), to help her try and thwart him for good. To do so, she feels compelled to visit the church camp their mother once attended to investigate the true source of her haunting. While marooned at the blustery camp on a frozen lake (everyone loves winter camp!), the kids are tested by a new version of the masked villain, one who lives in dreams and carries powers beyond that of emotional manipulation. Snowed in with a few scrappy camp staff, the crew works to uncover the mystery of missing campers from Gwen and Finney’s mother’s time in hopes of besting The Grabber once and for all.

It’s a mess, kids. One could cynically consider the breakout success of The Grabber inspiring a sequel that’s limited by the fact that the masked villain is already dead. So, to combat that and keep him around, I guess he’d have to be a supernatural dream being. And it’s not impossible, human killers have become immortal terrors successfully (think Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers), and I guess that inspired The Grabber’s creators … perhaps a bit too much. This version of the killer has a Mary Poppins bag of tricks and powers that just keep giving him some other ability for the kids to figure out how to battle. He murders campers with a sharp object, he wears a mask, he haunts and can kill you in dreams. And he can do it all on skates.

Aside from the messy collection of horror villain abilities, Black Phone 2 is a collection of Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill’s (director and co-writers) worst impulses. Where they successfully crafted grainy-looking snuff films to add spice to Sinister, the use here to denote the difference between Gwen’s dreams and real life feels like another visual tone shift in a movie already made messy by CGI and confusing editing. Where Derrickson explored religion in horror to dazzling effect in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, here it feels like confusing fluff, leaving characters to awkwardly quote scripture in a way that’s “hot.” Earnest moments of emotional growth are uncomfortable and clunky, and worse, redundant and a slog in a horror sequel with a nearly two-hour runtime. Conveniences and contrivances are welcome only as they move the slow movie closer to the conclusion. But the climax does not feel worth waiting for as it turns into a difficult-to-see spectacle of The Grabber’s brand-new powers and weaknesses, and a soft attempt at turning Gwen into a Carrie-Nancy-Thompson-hybrid hero.

In my review of The Black Phone, I commended Hawke’s performance and Tom Savini’s mask being blended to create something so menacing when the character’s dynamic face and half-masks would be mismatched or used for terror. That is so completely thwarted here by ghost-Grabber who is either completely masked or only exposed with a gore gag. I’d assumed while watching that Hawke was only available for ADR, though he apparently performed the role, which makes it even more of a waste that he was relegated to a few small poses while cloaked in shadows. McGraw once again does the heavy lifting and it’s a hindrance for Thames who simply cannot keep up by selling us any version of him as a hardened older brother type.

Black Phone 2 is ultimately bigger, badder, and full of more scares than its predecessor, but it’s somehow rendered so much less successful. The larger scares, the supernatural abilities, and frenetic camera work might have made for a haunting standalone terror, but by weighing it down with the kids’ trauma and overly explained retcon lore to make it into something bigger, it ends up making it all feel smaller, messier, and a thin reminder of a villain who once was. The first was held up by a hammy killer in a horrific location, and this covers him in a mask, makes him sometimes invisible, and weighs everyone down into a frozen lake with devastation porn and odd maxims that would have even sounded off coming from Joel Schumacher’s Mr. Freeze.

Black Phone 2 hits theaters October 17, 2025