Dropping the “the,” adding the number “2,” and leaving a subtitle offscreen and thus, unseen, Black Phone 2, the unexpected (for audiences), much anticipated (for studio executives) sequel to co-writer/director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Gorge, Sinister) and frequent collaborator co-writer/producer C. Robert Cargill, 2021 supernatural horror hit, The Black Phone. And “hit” is the right word as The Black Phone earned 10x its modest production costs at the box office, a return all but guaranteed to turn a sequel from a possibility to an eventuality.
Black Phone 2 brings back the central duo, Finney Blake (Mason Thames) and his younger sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), for another go-round with the so-called “Grabber” (Ethan Hawke), the recently deceased child kidnapper and serial killer who terrorized Finney before losing his life in the final moments of the first film. Helped by the vengeful ghosts of the Grabber’s previous victims, the black phone of the title, and Gwen’s dream-based premonitions, Finney escaped from the Grabber’s clutches, spirit, body, and mind relatively intact. Survival, however, came at a cost, the kind of life-altering trauma that invisibly dictates every decision, every word, and every reaction he makes or takes.
Older now, but irrevocably marked by his experience with the Grabber, Finney self-medicates through the copious intake of marijuana, while his father, Terrence (Jeremy Davies), three years sober and newly dedicated to providing Finney and Gwen a more stable home life, repeatedly fails to coax Finney into avoiding the same tortured path he took into depression, despair, and alcohol and domestic abuse. As Gwen attempts to support Finney emotionally, the dream-based premonitions — once again depicted via Super-8 film, including periodic burn marks onscreen — she inherited from her late mother have grown stronger.
A sleepwalker, Gwen begins to dream about the still unsolved murders of three young boys at a Christian-themed winter alpine camp thirty years earlier. A different black phone, this time attached to a lone phone booth at the edge of a lake, mysteriously connects Gwen to her similarly aged teen mother. In effect, Gwen’s dreams allow her to time-travel into the past, witnessing not just her mother, but the Grabber and his first victims, including their violent deaths, here depicted with a maximum of bloodletting, occasional gore, but deliberately edited to minimize the emotional effect on audiences sitting on the other side of the screen. It’s meant to retain sympathy and empathy for the Grabber’s victims without venturing too far into exploitation. It works.
Dead isn’t dead in horror, of course. Taking more than a few pages from Wes Craven’s screenplay for The Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels, the Grabber’s physical death didn’t end his reign of terror. While the Grabber died with a finality atypical for horror films, especially horror films with sequel or franchise potential, his physical demise separated him from his immortal, immortally damned soul. And here, he’s tied to the hidden corpses of his earlier victims. Buried somewhere on the campgrounds, the spirits of his earlier victims can’t rest until their bodies are found and properly handled, giving the Grabber’s ghost the fear-based power not only to linger in our world, but to cause havoc.
The efficient, economical script leans on Gwen’s blossoming powers to guide and direct the action, switching the second film’s protagonist from Finney to Gwen. Finney remains, however, as a key, secondary character. Gwen even gets an erstwhile boyfriend, Ernesto Arellano (Miguel Mora), the younger brother of one of the Grabber’s unfortunate victims and Finney’s friend. Understandably protective of Gwen, Finney repeatedly objects to Gwen and Ernesto’s teen romance, but Gwen, asserting her agency and autonomy, rejects whatever obstacles Finney attempts to put in her relationship with Ernesto.
When Gwen declares the answers to the Grabber’s return lie somewhere in the campgrounds surrounding the alpine lake, she signs them both up for a mid-winter counselor-in-training session with the camp’s owner and operator, Armando Reyes (Demián Bichir), and his niece, Mustang( Arianna Rivas). With Ernesto joining them, they arrive at the campgrounds just as another winter blizzard closes the roads in or out, effectively stranding them Shining-style, for the duration of the storm and its immediate aftermath.
While Black Phone 2 doesn’t try to hide its genre influences, especially The Nightmare on Elm Street series, the aforementioned snowbound terrors of The Shining, and, to a lesser extent, the Friday the 13th series, they become of lesser importance as Black Phone sets the overall stakes, pitting the Grabber vs. Gwen (stalking in her dreams), and the race to find the bodies of the Grabber’s victims before he can irreparably harm Gwen as an act of revenge against Finney.
The layered sibling bond elevated the first film beyond its grim genre trappings (a child kidnapping serial killer) into a film with an emotionally resonant undertow. Where Gwen helped save Finney from the Grabber, using her dream-based powers to find his location, in turn, now Finney has to do something similar, subsume his own fears, anxieties, and self-doubts to save his sister. On its own, that sister-brother journey made The Black Phone worth watching and, on occasion, revisiting. The similar thematic undercurrent does the same for the better-than-expected sequel.
Black Phone 2 opens theatrically on Friday, October 17th, via Universal Pictures.
