At one point in Black Phone 2, the Grabber, the villain played so memorably by Ethan Hawke, reunites with his potential victim from the first film. “Did you think our story was over, Finny?” the demonic masked figure asks tauntingly.
It seems a reasonable question, since the Grabber died at the end of the previous film, dispatched by Finn (Mason Thames). But we’re talking about the movie business, after all, and the death of the principal villain proves no impediment to making a sequel if the original film was profitable enough — which, with a worldwide gross of $160 million, it certainly was. Fortunately, this follow-up arriving four year later is no mere cash grab but rather an even more stylistically and thematically ambitious effort that mostly succeeds in its aspirations.
Black Phone 2
It’s a grabber.
When we’re reintroduced to Finn, it’s clear that he’s still suffering from trauma over his past ordeal. He violently lashes out at a fellow student and spends many of his waking hours in a marijuana-induced haze. It’s no wonder, considering what he went through, and it seems perfectly understandable that he answers randomly ringing payphones by telling the callers, “Sorry, but I can’t help you.” (If you don’t get the reference, you obviously haven’t seen the first film.)
Of course, escaping from the past isn’t so easy when his younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) begins suffering from horrible dreams in which she channels not only their late mother (Anna Lore), who committed suicide, but also three young boys who we eventually learn were murdered by the Grabber in his early killing days and whose bodies have gone undiscovered. The visions ultimately lead her and Finn to Alpine Lake, a Christian camp located in the Rocky Mountains, where they naturally get stranded during a fierce blizzard.
It turns out that death hasn’t really slowed down the Grabber, who seems intent on getting revenge against Finn even from the depths of Hell. Much like Freddy Krueger, he’s able to wreak psychic and physical violence on people from within their dreams, making Gwen particularly vulnerable to him.
Director Scott Derrickson and his co-screenwriter Robert Cargill seem to know that their convoluted storyline is a lot of hooey, but they lean into it so emphatically that we just go with it. They do manage to invest the horrific proceedings with genuine emotion in their depiction of the tortured family dynamics between the two siblings and their father (Jeremy Davies, repeating his role). And they inject interesting religious themes in their treatment of Christianity, the more repressive aspects of which are demonstrated by a pair of officious husband-and-wife camp employees (Graham Abbey, Maev Beaty).
Every horror film needs a great villain, and this burgeoning franchise definitely has one with the Grabber. Largely hidden behind a series of genuinely scary, demonic-looking masks, Hawke delivers one for the ages, using his cigarette-ravaged, raspy voice to chilling effect in a virtuosic, mostly voice portrayal that seems destined for future installments.
Thames and McGraw, repeating their roles, are absolutely terrific as the traumatized teens willing to do battle with evil, and there are sterling supporting turns from Demian Bechir as the camp’s sympathetic owner and Arianna Rivas (A Working Man) as his spunky niece. In an example of stunt casting that actually works, Miguel Mora, who played one of the Grabber’s victims in the first film, now plays the victim’s brother, who forms a romantic connection with Gwen.
Derrickson is no stranger to the horror genre, having helmed not only the first Black Phone but also such films as Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. He exerts stylistic mastery over the material, using both Super 8 and Super 16 film for the nightmarish sequences to truly eerie effect. Not to mention the unsettling score by Atticus Derrickson, his son, that will do nothing to lower your blood pressure.
There are times when Black Phone 2 wears its stylistic influences — including not only the Nightmare on Elm Street films but many other horror movies from the ‘80s — too heavily on its sleeve. But the extensive borrowings are easily forgiven when the set pieces are delivered with the sort of panache that they are here.
