Black Phone 2

2021’s The Black Phone was an enormously effective horror, putting kids in mortal peril and not pulling nearly as many punches as you might expect. We rejoin its characters four years on for a film that tries, commendably, to do something different with its tone and approach, but which also isn’t nearly as terrifying as its predecessor.

Director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill take lingering trauma as their starting point. Finney (Mason Thames) is struggling with anger management and unwanted flashbacks to his time with the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) when we meet him again, and self-medicating with marijuana — an echo of his father’s (Jeremy Davies) flawed coping mechanisms. His inventively foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), the low-key lead this time, is sleepwalking due to dreams about their late mother and something she once experienced as a teenager working in a “Christian winter camp” in the mountains nearby (basically a summer camp with more ice-skating). Gwen, her friend Ernie (Miguel Mora) and a reluctant Finney brave the snow to head up to the camp, but find the Grabber’s ghost among those waiting for them when they're subsequently snowed in.

A sequel that's interesting, but never quite compelling.

The performances are committed and the tone appropriately chilly, but at times this strays perilously close to Nightmare On Elm Street territory, with danger in both the heavily grained video of the dream world and the crisply shot real one to be faced and fought. But the physical threat is less oppressive than last time, both because Finney and Gwen have a supportive gang around them (not all of whom are obviously marked for death) and because the Grabber is, well, largely incorporeal now.

There are still creepy scenes, most involving a disused phone booth by the lake, and big, set-piece scares, but this lacks the moment-by-moment terror of the last. The new focus on Gwen works well when it's about her existential fear of following her mother to mental illness and death as a result of her dreams, but that falls away in the last act in favour of more conventional obstacles. The result is a sequel that's interesting, but never quite compelling.