The Black Phone was a 2022 physiological horror film directed by Scott Derrickson about a kidnapped boy Finney Blake who speaks to other deceased kidnapped boys through a disconnected Black Phone. He uses this information to defeat his abductor, The Grabber, played by Ethan Hawke. This was a widely successful film with audiences and critics alike. So naturally, Universal Pictures and Jason Blum wanted to greenlight a sequel as fast as they could. This didn’t work out so well with Megan 2.0, but it worked much better with Black Phone 2. This is a sequel that I hoped it would be, and I very much enjoyed it.

Finney (Mason Thames, How to Train Your Dragon) is not dealing with his fame of killing “The Grabber” from the previous film very well. He’s getting in fights all the time and receives phone calls from phones wherever he goes. He responds “I can’t help you” to whoever is on the other end. His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw, the sister of Violet McGraw), on the other hand, has sleeping walking dreams. She sees things she can’t understand about boys on a lake. They write letters and numbers on the ice. When she starts to get calls from her deceased mother from the past, she convinces her boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) and her brother to help her figure out what’s going on. They journeyed in a winter storm to a summer camp location called Alpine Lake, where the calls originated from. This place is the key to everything that’s going on.

The actors Thames and McGraw have both aged since the first Black Phone. There are now teenagers in this sequel. They both do a great job in this horror sequel, but mainly, this is McGraw’s story. Her dreams, which send her to a different plain of existence, are the key to her figuring out what’s going on. Because this is a sequel, you know “The Grabber” has to play a part in the story. How can that be since he died in the first film? That’s a big question. He haunts the dreams of the McGraw character, and she needs help in bothering the real world and dream world to get to the bottom of this murder mystery that took place years before this. When their mother was at the camp. This has a prequel type feeling as well as a sequel storyline.

Derrickson does a great job with the script this time around like he did with the storyline from the previous film. He weaves in layers of plot that fit together like puzzle pieces. The real-world stuff and the dream world stuff fit seamlessly together. I was very impressed by how well everything worked so well. That’s the key to this story. How all the pieces fit together is part of why these movies work so well. The story is based on the short story by Joe Hill, but he and C Robert Cargill adapt it very well and add to it in fantastic ways. They expanded on the story, which also expands on the world around the characters as well. This is how you write a sequel to a successful horror film. 

As I mentioned, a few of the characters from the first film come back in the sequel, such as Jeremy Davies as the kids’ father, but there are also newer characters that are introduced as well. They are a camp counselor/owner played by Damien Bachir and his daughter Mustang (Arianna Rivas) as well as the actors that play the deceased boys that were killed in the past that are part of the new murder mystery and the past of Finn and Gwen’s mother as well as “The Grabber”. The cast is relatively small, but all the characters make a big impact on the story.

With any horror movie, there have to be elements that make it a horrific film. This one has some crazy practical effects showing the gruesome nature of what characters look like dead. These makeup effects looked pretty good. There are also cgi effects using special camera lenses to give the dream sequences that the McGraw character slips into a graining worn-out look.These effects worked so well in context to the film as a whole. They worked well with the 80s aesthetic to the movie I was now using in the present time. All of these various effects worked well together to give the movie an interesting look that fit into the story so well. I was genuinely impressed by the look of the film in every way.

Black Phone 2 was a fantastic experience. It expanded on the world Derrickson and company already created and gave me a new, interesting look at the established characters and world. The lead actors Thames and McGraw do a great job of bringing these characters back in the sequel/prequel. The character of “The Grabber”, Ethan Hawke, isn’t in the film as much as I’d liked, but he made an impact nonetheless. The physical and CGI effects were both very impressive to behold in this movie.  Derrickson gave viewers a lot of what they got from the previous film but did a great job of building the world out. Using the script and terrific character development. This was just as good as the previous movie in all the ways that I hoped it would be, but it’s also better in other ways.

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen