Movies & TV The Black Phone 2 The Black Phone 2 Creates Genuine Scares Despite Some Static on the Line Excellent acting and atmosphere elevates some shaky worldbuilding. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on October 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Four years after the events of The Black Phone, Finn and Gwen Blake are trying to move on with their lives, but it’s obvious that trauma hasn’t let go of them yet. Finn is full of rage. He beats up on any new kid who challenges him at school, and has basically become the meaner version of Robin Arellano, the kid who used to protect him from bullies. He also smokes weed constantly now—a slightly mellower mirror of his dad’s addiction to alcohol. Gwen, meanwhile, is having dreams again. Murdered children come to her in her sleep; she sleepwalks to find them. Only Finn knows how bad it’s gotten, but he refuses to talk about it…. until a series of uncanny events lead the kids to a camp in the mountains where they learn about the origins of The Grabber. Black Phone 2 takes the events of the first film seriously, and for the first three-quarters or so, this results in a dark, character-driven horror that worked really well for me. I think it’s kind of goes off the rails toward the end, but even then there’s interesting stuff. I’ll get into what works in as non-spoiler a way as possible, and dig into some of the themes in a spoiler paragraph or two. And don’t worry, unlike The Grabber I’ll warn you before any black balloons come out. Black Phone 2 was written by C. Robert Cargill and Scott Derrickson, and directed by Derrickson. The duo have made Sinisters 1 and 2, Doctor Strange, The Gorge, and the first Black Phone together. (Cargill also wrote No Man of God, a small movie about Ted Bundy that I really love, despite hating movies about Ted Bundy.) The pair have left Joe Hill’s excellent short story far behind them now, but this doesn’t feel like a cash grab or a needless sequel. Instead, Cargill and Derrickson take a serious look at what would happen to a kid who went through the events of the first movie. How do you come back from that? What does it do to you, and your family? Especially when you’ve just gone through the trauma of your mother’s death by suicide? They also clearly wanted to give Gwen a chance to shine, as I think she’s more the protagonist here. Once again Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw are great in the roles, even if I thought there were points that were designed to let McGraw ACT. Jeremy Davies (my beloved) is back as their father, now fighting the booze and trying hard to make up for having been a physically and emotionally abusive shit for years. The problem with that is that he now skulks tentatively through his own house asking his kids how they feel without really wanting an answer, and trying to perform a caricature of a gruff-but-good-natured Dad for a pair of traumatized teens. And he’s not that, he’s also lived through the events that his kids did. But this is 1982, only the last-gasp hippies talk about feelings casually, and only City Folk and movie characters go to therapy. (This is one early ding against the movie I’ll mention: at multiple points people use slang that I’m pretty sure was not in use. Gwen uses “spitballing” as “brainstorming”; the term “woo-woo” is used about beliefs that might be considered New Age; another character says “I know it’s been a minute” since he talked to someone, when he means it’s been months—and maybe that phrase was in use in the Black community by then, but the character isn’t Black. The clothes also look a little too new and sleek. I only mention this because I thought the first film did a pretty solid job of keeping us in the late-70s.) Black Phone 2 uses a series of incredibly eerie dream sequences to lead the kids to an isolated, snowbound camp, where it fully becomes The Shining-meets-A Nightmare on Elm Street-meets-The More Emotional Moments Of Doctor Sleep. An enormous amount of it works. The dream sequences have multiple layers to them, to really capture the feeling of being trapped in the surrealism of dreams, and play out in this awful nauseating mid-Century home movie film stock. The film adds a friend of Gwen’s, the camp’s owner, his niece, and two Christian counselors (Miguel Mora, Demián Bichir, Arianna Rivas, Graham Abbey, and Maev Beaty) to the cast, and while I think more could have been done with all of them, they’re solid additions. And then, of course, The Grabber is back because otherwise there’d be no movie, and Ethan Hawke does a great bit of voicework making him menacing. Particularly fun are the scenes where The Grabber gets to muse on the nature of Hell, because Hawke is clearly enjoying the shit out of his monologues. The atmosphere of the camp worked really well for me, too, as the wind and snow howls around outside cabins, and the living human characters only have a few hours of wintry daylight to investigate the crimes of the past before they’re plunged into darkness. I think the film gets a bit too convoluted, as horror movie sequels often do. There was one plot twist (that I won’t spoil) that infuriated me in its obviousness—one of the characters even says it’s obvious, but that doesn’t let you off the hook, movie. And the film’s rules get a little too fuzzy even by horror movie standards. In the first Black Phone, if The Grabber had just killed Finn, there’s no movie. So instead you get an hour of him coming down to the murder basement be horrific and threaten Finn, but then there’s always a reason he has to leave so Finn can live long enough to  answer the Black Phone and live another day. Here, The Grabber is unfettered by death. So what exactly are his powers? Why are there any constraints on him at all? Again, it’s because “no constraints = no movie”—but when you’ve implied that he’s a loose malevolent spirit terrorizing people though the chaos of their dreams, you’ve also cut the brakes on your plot, and it leads to some weaker stuff as the film goes along. There are also scenes when the dialogue veers into ridiculous cheese, particularly between Finn, Gwen, and their dad as they try to work their Complicated Stuff out. And finally, my constant horror movie bugbear: grievous wounds that turn out to be no big deal. Like there are point where we see people lose enough blood to utterly incapacitate them, but they… shake it off and seem fine half a scene later. BP2 is much gorier and more graphic than the first one, which I loved, but that also means that people should be much more wounded and weak than they are. While Finn’s plot is really about him grappling with the anger and fear of being kidnapped and almost murdered, Gwen’s is more about her learning how to wield her uncanny abilities—and again, in theory I love that kind of narrative, but here there were points when it felt a little too easy. But I’ll also say that I watched this movie at one of those theaters where you can order food and drink, and, even though the two young men next to me treated this as an opportunity for a multi-course FEAST, and even though they occasionally whispered to each other and checked their phones, all of that noise fell away during those dream sequences—and, to be fair, my neighbors seemed to lock in whenever things got intense as well. If a horror movie can make you feel real dread even as you’re surrounded by the scent of mozzarella sticks and boozy milkshakes, that kind of balances the fact that the third act cracks under its own weight. Now in order to get into the thing that really bothered me about the movie’s worldbuilding, I’ll need to spoil most of the ending. If you haven’t seen it yet, and want to, I advise you to skate along down the frozen lake now, and come back when you want to dig into the plot. HERE BE COSMOLOGICAL SPOILERS Someday I’d like to review a movie where I don’t have to use the sentence: “Why is this movie’s theology so weird????” But today is not that day. WHY IS HIS MOVIE’S THEOLOGY SO WEIRD??? We established in the first film that Gwen has a deep personal spirituality: she believes that Jesus sends her dreams to help people, and that he did the same thing for her mom, except that in her mom’s case the dreams led to a depression that killed her. She views the dreams as a curse, kind of, but also doesn’t want to disappoint Jesus. Meanwhile Finney gets phone calls from what seem to be the trapped ghosts of children, all victims of The Grabber. It’s those ghosts who help him defeat the man in the end, and it’s Gwen’s dreams that lead the cops to the house where he buried the children’s bodies. Their dad hates religion because he thinks it killed their mom, so they don’t get into any of this stuff with him. It works, I think, because there’s no confirmation of the Jesus angle. Gwen believes it, Finn believes in her dreams, the ghosts are objectively real, The Grabber’s killed by Finn, the end. Now in the sequel: Gwen’s dreams are much more involved, and she’s sleepwalking and getting hurt in her dreams. She still thinks it Jesus doing it, though, even as the other kids at school call her a witch and make her an outcast. (The film misses an opportunity to tie this in with the very real and deeply stupid Satanic Panic, unfortunately—it would have been fun to touch on, especially since we’re living through another one of those.) Finn also receives phone calls, but his come while he’s awake. Out-of-order payphones ring, he picks up, says he can’t help the ghost kid on the other end, and hangs up. Gwen’s dreams feature calls from, and visions of, a camp, which turns out to be a Christian youth camp up in the mountains that their mother worked at as a young woman. Some of the calls mean that Gwen is speaking to her dead mother across time, and it’s soon implied that her mom was also receiving visions to try to help kids. It also turns out that (sigh) this camp is where The Grabber got his murderous start. When Gwen and Finn get there, the Grabber goes full Freddy Krueger and uses the trapped energy of his first victims to try to kill Gwen in order to torture Finn. That’s all fine. Gwen tangles with the camp counselors, who want her to be a shiny happy Christian rather than a traumatized girl with a mouth on her. When one of them tries to throw a passage from (I think) Philippians at her, she returns fire by quoting a different passage. She also has a discussion of her faith with her friend Ernesto that I think gets a little too awkward to work, even as a religious conversation between two teens. Fine. The camp’s new owner—who again is a religious man who run a Christian youth camp—has been investigating the mysterious deaths that happened on the site in the 50s, and has been praying for guidance in that regard, and comes to believe that Gwen was sent to him to help. This shuts the other counselors up—but also puts a lot of pressure on Gwen, and introduces an adult authority figure who believes in her and backs her up, which kind of shuts down the more interesting path (I think) that it was The Grabber who lured them to the camp, and Jesus had nothing to do with it. Ernesto and Finn talk about Ernie’s older brother, Robin, who was Finn’s best friend, one of The Grabber’s victims, and the one who, in the end, did the most to help Finn from beyond the grave. That conversation is sweet, tentative, with Robin finally mustering the courage to ask Finn (who’s become kind of a scary badass) about what happened in The Grabber’s murder basement, and to talk a bit about his brother and whether Finn thinks he’s still around as a ghost. Finn says that if Robin is still around, it would be to look after Ernie. This is heartfelt, and feels real in the context of The Black Phone’s worldbuilding. The Grabber and Gwen have a conversation about Hell that was one of my favorite bits in the entire film. The Grabber says that anything human about his has been burned away, and that now he’s “a bottomless well of sin”, and that since he could do anything he wanted in dreams he could kill Gwen in her sleep and she’d die in real life. Again, my hope was that the film would reveal that The Grabber was the one pulling all the strings at the camp, that he’d been infect Gwen’s mind for years, that they’d walked into a trap fully unprepared. And there is a little bit of that—but then suddenly Gwen knows how to fight back in her dreams, and is also able to do things in dreams that impact the real world.  But even that could work! It’s that at the end of the film, after The Grabber has been sent back to Hell, and his victims’ bodies have been found, one of the out-of-order phones rings again. And it’s Gwen’s mom calling from Heaven. Which. OK. Why is she able to do this now? She only talks to Gwen, tand tells her to tell Finn she loves him—but not enough to ask Gwen to call him over to the phone, apparently. And then she tells her daughter to tell Finn that Finn’s friend Robin says “hi”—even though Robin’s actual brother who misses the shit out of him is a couple yards away. She also says that the souls of the three earlier victims are with her in Heaven now, because apparently, as with The Grabber’s other victims, they  only got there after they were freed by Finn and Gwen? So, is Gwen’s idea about Jesus completely off, and her universe is a chaotic tangle of “good” and “evil” and there is a good afterlife but you only get to go after your soul is set free by plucky teens? But then how did their mom get to Heaven, given that she is also one of the Grabber’s victims, so by the film’s logic her should should have been trapped just like the others???? In which case why THE FUCK didn’t she call her terrified son on The Black Phone during the first movie????? OK but also: during this phone call from Heaven, Gwen’s mom sounds for all the world like she’s a patient at a mental hospital or a recovery center, making her One Phone Call A Day under the watchful eye of an overworked shift nurse. WHY. Like is Jesus standing there tapping his watch? Are there other dead people lined up waiting for the phone? Why does The Grabber get a no holds barred weekend pass from Hell in order to terrorize children, but Gwen and Finn’s murdered mom only gets a rushed, staticky, five minute call? Look ghosts are one thing, but when you drag this much otherworldly STUFF into your movie, you need to cross your fucking t’s. END OF COSMOLOGICAL SPOILERS! I’ll sum up by saying that I enjoyed enough of this movie to recommend it. It isn’t quite as strong as The Black Phone, but it’s trying to do something way more interesting than most horror sequels, and when it works it’s an intense piece of wintry horror.[end-mark] The post <em>The Black Phone 2</em> Creates Genuine Scares Despite Some Static on the Line appeared first on Reactor.