Black Phone 2 and all the images you see in this review are owned by Universal Pictures

Directed by Scott Derrickson

Black Phone is another one of those movies where I thought I’d published a review for it, only to find out that it doesn’t exist. I remember watching it fairly close to its release date and was rather impressed with its sharp writing and interesting premise, but maybe I got distracted by something like that Beavis and Butthead movie and never got around to putting my thoughts on the word processor. In any case, it’s time for the inevitable sequel as any horror movie that makes money is guaranteed to get, but what raised my interest for this one is that everyone came back for it, not just the stars but the writer and director, and the trailers that looked to take things in a wildly different direction. With so much in this movie’s favor, can this be one of the few horror sequels to surpass the original, or was there only enough juice in that lemon to wring out one good story? Let’s find out!!

After surviving his kidnapping from The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), young Finney (Mason Thames) is still trying to process what had happened to him, which isn’t helped by the dead periodically contacting him for help and dredging up those old memories. His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), however, proves to be much more proactive on this issue, though that probably has to do with the fact that she’s having nightmares about murder victims every night that are pointing her to an old Christian Youth Camp that her mother once attended when she was their age. Not wanting her sister to be defenseless for whatever it is that’s waiting at the camp, Finnney goes along with her and their friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) to investigate whatever mystery has brought them there in the first place. It doesn’t take long for The Grabber, whatever he may be this long after his death, to make his presence known and to start taking his revenge against the two of them. Why is The Grabber’s spirit so strong at this camp, and what can these two siblings hope to accomplish by putting themselves right at his doorstep? Are the mysterious ghosts that brought them here looking for help from the living, or are they just pawns in The Grabber’s machinations? It’s a good thing this camp just happens to have a payphone by the lake; otherwise they’d have to call this something else!

This is a tough one, folks. I’m certainly no stranger to contrarian opinions, but I genuinely feel bad about not liking this movie as much as I wanted to. Perhaps I hyped myself up too much after seeing that phenomenal trailer that sold this as a modern day update to A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it’s hard not to make the comparison when so much of this movie uses dreams, the paranormal and psychic connections to tell its story. None of it is incompetently used, at least for the most part, there’s just never a sense of it all coming together to make something interesting. The reason why is that, despite using the language of a Freddy film, its ambition is less to be an update on his classic flicks than to be a Mike Flanagan riff, and I’m sad to say that the dialogue is just not up to snuff to reach those lofty goals. It’s certainly about whatever passes for slasher movie dialogue, and there are scenes where the characters have interesting and meaningful conversations, but there are far too many times when it feels clunk and expository; over-explaining a relatively simple concept yet treating such banality with deathly seriousness. For a horror movie, there are few things worse than taking the mystery out of what we’re supposed to be afraid of, and this movie has a bad habit of doing that; not just in its dialogue but in its cinematography, which brings us to the next disappointment of the film.

The idea of filming dreams in a low quality VHS style is brilliant and is reminiscent of analog horror, which has been all the rage with the young folks. If you wanted to update the Nightmare on Elm Street formula, this is a great place to start, but in execution, it sadly fails to live up to that. The dream sequences in their full execution, and not cut up for a trailer, lacks a sense of the fantastical. The elements that aren’t realistic are still grounded in the way they are filmed. Dead bodies walking around don’t have an extra element of the weird or absurd that would separate it from any standard zombie sequence outside the context of a dream. They don’t even make significant changes to the environment as the character who is dreaming is walking around the exact same locations with the exact same geography and spatial relationships; giving off an effect less of being in a dream than being in a parallel dimension, though not nearly as interesting as that would sound. What further solidifies this feeling is the decision for this low quality VHS style to be strictly enforced so that we are always completely certain when the character is dreaming versus when they are awake. It’s baffling how stringent this is as any good movie about dreams will have parts where you aren’t sure if we’re awake or asleep, and yet this movie completely removes that ambiguity with the visible change between styles. Thankfully, the movie doesn’t rely on the dreams for all of its scary moments, and there are parts that will surprise you throughout. I’d even argue that the lack of interesting cinematography in the dreams is well compensated by the beautiful cinematography overall, which paints wonderful tableaus of wind-swept snowy environments that feel cold as you watch these characters march their way through it. It’s just a shame that its biggest new idea turned out to be this mishandled, as I’d love to see a mainstream horror movie use this concept with much more care and finesse.

Now sure, we can discuss the finer points of cinematography and storytelling, but at the end of the day, a horror movie should be scary and a few good chilling moments can make up for a lot. Is this movie saved by its scares and its slasher? Not exactly, because much like everything else in this movie, they end up being a mixed bag. We get some genuinely creepy moments and at least one fantastic sequence of violence, but the movie just pulls its punches far too often to maintain a sense of dread. Ethan Hawke’s Grabber is somehow both the saving grace of the movie and its biggest failing because the scenes where he really gets to emote and bounce off of another character’s performance are well executed, but he’s not that much of a threat throughout the movie, and it’s hard not to be constantly aware of how little he’s accomplishing throughout its runtime. This may count as a spoiler of sorts, so I won’t say whether or not this is the case for the ending, but I will at least say for sure that he does not kill a single person throughout the rest of the movie. I dislike ever saying that a certain genre needs to follow certain rules, but the fact that The Grabber does not take a life makes it hard to take him seriously as a threat; especially when most of his dialogue is proclamations about how angry he is and how much revenge he’s gonna get. As a dramatic figure and a foil for our protagonists, he is well written and has enough layers to be compelling whenever he’s on-screen, but in the same way that a particularly diabolical figure is in a drama film; not as a looming threat of mortal danger. If they wanted to make a drama, which arguably the first one was to an extent, then that’s what they should have stuck with. These attempts to make the movie bigger, meaner, and scarier just end up falling flat because it doesn’t feel like the filmmakers were interested in those aspects of the story, and yet that’s so much of what the movie relies on to keep your interest which ends up wavering whenever the dialogue goes long or The Grabber fails to seal the deal on ever raising the stakes.

This is a movie that’s stuck between two worlds; never quite having enough the sick fun of a retro slasher or the stimulating character drama of Mike Flanagan. The first film threaded that needle as its story was fairly simplistic, and the gore was relatively tame, but the two sides complemented each other as the smaller story kept the moments of violence effective and the nastier scenes never overshadowed the great character work. The larger ambitions of this film end up being its downfall, as you expect much more from the setup than the movie is willing to deliver, and the experience ends up feeling stifling and half-hearted. Still, the moments where the movie does pick a lane are well realized and there are some genuinely great highlights throughout the story that keeps it just engaging enough to give it a recommendation. Probably not in theaters given how low-key it all feels despite how big it tries to be, but it’s a solid enough ghost story once it’s all said and done. The Grabber is certainly no Freddy, at least not yet, but it’s not like we have many horror icons left for us these days, and Art can’t carry an entire industry on his shoulders alone!