The Black Phone 2 (2025)

Warning: I’ll not spoil the second act, but certainly parts of the ending here

Years after surviving his kidnapping by the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in the first movie, Finn (Mason Thames), now a late teenager, struggles with his clearly untreated trauma, with pot and violence his main methods of control. Recently, his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has been having terrible nightmares featuring the ghosts of dead children at a snowy summer (winter?) camp and other curious details. These nightmares are now beginning to turn into feats of rather impressive sleepwalking, one of which leads Gwen to the Grabber’s old house and the black phone with the direct line to the dead in its cellar. There, she has a phone conversation with her and Finn’s dead mother. Some research and a bit of luck suggest to Gwen where the camp from her dreams is situated and because she’s convinced this is not a thing she can just ignore and hope it’ll go away, she, an unwilling Finn, and her prospective boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) make their way to snowy Montana (I believe), as camp counsellors in training. There, Finn, too, will have phone conversations with the dead again, and all will be haunted by the shadow of the Grabber.

On paper, The Black Phone 2, like the first one directed by Scott Derrickson and scripted by Derrickson and his eternal writing partner (lieutenant of Megaforce) C. Robert Cargill, is yet another exercise in 80s horror nostalgia, remixing elements of the original movie with A Nightmare on Elm Street. Particularly the establishing scenes hit that kind of nostalgia pretty hard, not just with pointedly cheesy bits of dialogue but also aesthetically. However, while the 80s never go away, they turn out only to be one of the movie’s touch stones, and are really an easy way to establish an aesthetic reality things then begin to deviate more and more from.

Once the dreams start in earnest, and even more so once the characters end up in the snow and ice, the film begins to let other eras, film stocks (well, probably digital filters to emulate other filmstocks, but it’s so well done, this really doesn’t matter), and ideas take over. The film then proceeds to create a mood of liminality, of drifting between dream and reality, of borders crossed and uncrossed without the characters realizing in so brilliant a manner, I found myself perfectly okay with its at its core very straightforward narrative and characterisation. But then, straightforward doesn’t mean bad – particularly the characters are likeable and clearly drawn, and some of the differences in how Gwen and Finn relate to their respective traumata feel as if they’ll become rather less straightforward on second or third watch. It’s also nice to watch a really well-made contemporary horror film that allows its characters to triumph about the monster (and work at their trauma) for once. I’m all for 70s horror downer endings, but have grown somewhat annoyed by serious contemporary horror’s insistence that fights are always hopeless, grief insurmountable, and so on and so forth. This is a movie that is convinced sometimes, you can ram evil’s face repeatedly against a frozen surface. A message I approve of.

But really, it’s the mood and the film’s consistently thought-through aesthetics that particularly excite me: Black Phone 2 is a mood held for the length of a whole movie.