I don’t think anyone saw this coming. Even when the filmmakers had told us well in advance that they were planning on making it.
Sure, The Black Phone was a surprisingly solid thriller that turned heads and made money, but a sequel? With Ethan Hawke coming back? How the nine hells could that even be possible, after Hawke’s character was clearly and graphically killed onscreen at the end of the first movie?
The solution was as diabolically ingenious as it was blindingly obvious: The first movie was all about a protagonist who could speak with ghosts. If the Grabber’s victims could come back to haunt our main character, why not the Grabber himself?!
Thus Black Phone 2 picks up four years after the events of the first movie. Finney Blake (a returning Mason Thames) is now a high schooler coping with serious PTSD from everything that happened in the Grabber’s basement. He’s socially isolated, self-medicating with marijuana, and beating the brain cells out of anyone in school who dares to even mention his unwitting fame as the Grabber-slayer. As for Finney’s little sister (Gwen Blake, played once again by Madeleine McGraw), she’s still struggling to deal with her recurring psychic visions and the suicide of the mother she inherited her premonitions from.
Though at least their father (a returning Jeremy Davies) has made good on his promise to stay sober and stop abusing his kids. So they’ve got that going for them.
Anyway, the plot kicks off when Gwen’s dreams go increasingly haywire, leading to a phone call with a young girl from thirty years prior. (It also leads to a cameo from James Ransone, because of course director/co-writer Scott Derrickson had to fit him in somewhere like in all of his movies.) Long story short, Gwen’s visions point to a nearby Christian youth camp that just happens to be hiring teenagers as CITs. (That’s “counselors in training” for those who never went to youth camp.)
There’s more going on at this particular youth camp than I can get into without spoilers. Suffice to say that Finney and Gwen are among a mere handful of people who make it to the camp before a record-shattering blizzard isolates them from society. More importantly, Gwen is being haunted by the ghosts of three young campers who went missing several decades ago. And all of that gets established before the Grabber (Hawke, of course) somehow comes back as a malevolent spirit to complicate matters even further.
No getting around it, the plot is sloppy. Even so, kudos are due for the constant sense of momentum that keeps the film moving forward until the various themes, mysteries, and plot threads all dovetail together in a satisfying way. With the caveat that so much of this plot depends on extensive retcons.
Granted, this is a sequel that gets away with so many retcons because of how stripped-down the prequel was. For instance, the Grabber had always made a point of keeping himself enigmatic, cultivating this unknowable air as an inhuman monster — that’s a crucial part of what made him so scary in the first movie. Thus the filmmakers were free to rewrite pretty much his entire (previously nonexistent) backstory to suit the needs of the sequel. And while that does work up to a point, the filmmakers come perilously close to abusing that privilege. To be as specific and spoiler-free as I can, the filmmakers reveal that the Grabber had already crossed paths with our lead characters’ family on multiple occasions even before the events of the first movie. It’s enough to give me a headache for how hard I’m rolling my eyes.
The other big problem with the plot concerns the nature of our returning protagonist. Unlike the first movie, Finney is no longer a bully target and he doesn’t spend the whole film in isolation. Hell, the Grabber wants to drag out Finney’s pain and suffering before finally killing him, so Finney isn’t even really fighting for his life anymore to the extent that he was in the first movie. I need hardly add that our antagonist this time is an immaterial ghost, and Finney’s supernatural abilities were (and remain) limited to picking up the telephone when a ghost happens to call. In summary, the skill set and experience that Finney developed over the first movie don’t really work here.
What’s worse, Finney’s whole deal is that he keeps running away from his trauma. He’s doing his best to deny that his first ordeal with the Grabber ever happened. He’s trying to discourage his sister’s psychic visions. He refuses to answer the phone unless he absolutely has to. As a direct result, Finney has virtually zero agency in the plot. In fact, Finney takes every opportunity to actively surrender his own agency in the plot. Even at the end of the movie, when Finney finally gets his shot to put down the Grabber for good and all, that only comes after every other character in the cast — living and dead — has already done all the hard work for him!
Yes, the filmmakers bend over backwards to give Finney all these lines and screentime to try and create the illusion that he’s actually doing something. Yes, Thames is a demonstrably more seasoned and accomplished actor than he was four years ago and he’s acting his heart out from start to finish. Even so, there’s no getting around the fact that this is all in service of an anodyne and boilerplate development arc about coping with trauma by facing fears head-on. Sure, it’s a logical extension of his character arc from the first movie, but the arc is nonetheless a predictable affair with nothing new or surprising.
Except for the part where Finney’s self-destructive coping mechanisms are directly tied to the trauma-induced alcoholism of his father, calling back to the first movie. That was inspired.
So, what we’ve got here is a protagonist who’s more or less plateaued in his potential for character development and plot impact, and a sequel put together with the mandate of cramming everything possible into all the blank spaces left over by the sequel. You know exactly where this is heading: Little sister takes the limelight.
In terms of character development, thematic development, plot agency, and involvement in the scares and action set pieces, the vast majority goes to Gwen. Precisely because Gwen is the resident psychic, she takes the most direct role in discovering clues and fighting the Grabber while everyone else is stuck learning almost everything secondhand from her. I might add that Gwen gets her own storyline about coping with trauma — her mother’s suicide, the fresh horror that comes each night she falls asleep, the looming threat of losing her mind like her mom did, etc. — and she gets to serve as the courageous example for her brother and father to learn from.
Hell, Gwen even gets a love interest in this movie, something Finney doesn’t have in either film. Meet Ernesto, the surviving brother of Robin, one of the Grabber’s more notable victims from the first movie. (In a neat touch, both brothers across both movies are played by Miguel Mora.) Ernesto sits right on that awkward line, such that it’s difficult to tell if he’s sincerely interested in Gwen or if he’s some hormonal jerk who’s only interested because he thinks she’s cute. Either way, he works well enough as a comic relief, potential victim, and sounding board. Ernesto also gets a sweet little scene with Finney, as the both of them bond over the death of Robin and Finney’s experience talking with Robin’s ghost. That’s nice.
Anyway, for all my gripes about making Gwen the lead character, the change in focus makes sense. In the first movie, Gwen was merely a supporting character only barely important enough to show how much untapped potential was there. The sequel makes extensive use of that potential, and McGraw plays her part like a bona fide champion. The shift in protagonist is extremely jarring — especially since the film was so heavily marketed as a continuation of the Finney/Grabber conflict — but it works surprisingly well when you get used to it.
That aside, who else is in the cast? Honestly, the pickings are pretty slim. Jeremy Davies doesn’t really do much outside of one scene in the third act, though that scene is admittedly a barn-burner. Likewise, Demian Bichir plays Armando, an ex-convict who rose up through the ranks to serve as camp director. Aside from one show-stopping scene to try and mentor Finney through so much anger and pain, Bichir is otherwise wasted. Likewise, Arianna Rivas — in the role of Armando’s niece — proves herself way too charismatic for how little she gets to do. What’s worse, there’s a throwaway last-second line implying that Rivas’ character was supposed to be positioned as a love interest for Finney, and that line should’ve been thrown out with the rest of Rivas’ screentime.
Rounding out the supporting cast, we’ve got Maev Beaty and Graham Abbey as a couple of sanctimonious evangelical Christians on the camp staff. The less said about them, the better.
But with all of that aside, what about the Grabber? Well… he’s the Grabber, but dead. This character has always been a one-dimensional psychopath, and his iconic status is due entirely to how hard Ethan Hawke went in playing a larger-than-life homicidal maniac with no redeeming qualities. (Of course the mask designs helped a great deal as well.) The only stated difference is that after a few years in Hell, everything good about the Grabber has been torn away and there’s nothing left of him but sin and hatred. Given how there was precious little humanity in the Grabber to begin with, that doesn’t make for much of a sea change.
For better and for worse, this is pretty much a repeat of Hawke’s performance from the first movie with gnarlier prosthetic effects. Then again, given how Hawke’s performance was a crucial factor in the first movie’s success, maybe letting it ride was the smart choice.
Black Phone 2 is hardly a perfect movie, but in all honesty, neither was the first movie. Hawke is still fun to watch, the protagonists are still compelling, and Derrickson remains a fantastic director. While a few of the jump scares are obnoxious, the atmosphere is otherwise solid and the action set pieces have some brilliant touches. Of course it also helps that the central themes are beautifully poignant, especially in the hands of these actors.
Yes, the plot is kind of a mess until it isn’t, there’s a sense that the supporting actors are underutilized, and the retcons are stretched laughably thin. Even so, it bears repeating that this is a sequel that nobody asked for, nobody wanted, and everyone thought was impossible. By those standards, simply earning the right to exist is a huge accomplishment.
I wouldn’t recommend the film on its own merit, but I would strongly recommend it for anyone who saw and enjoyed the first movie. The two complement each other surprisingly well.