Black Phone 2 (2025)

**Alt text:**A teenage boy stands inside an old glass phone booth, holding the receiver to his ear with a worried expression. Outside the booth, a tall figure wearing a cracked, horned, demonic mask looms close, staring in at him. Snow is falling around them, and the masked figure’s dark clothing is dusted with frost. The scene feels tense and threatening, with the phone booth acting as a fragile barrier between the boy and the masked person.

Scott Derrickson had a problem on his hands. How do you continue a story that wrapped up rather neatly with the villain dead and the hero triumphant? His solution involves leaning hard into Nightmare on Elm Street territory, transforming the Grabber into something closer to Freddy Krueger, complete with supernatural dream invasions and death as merely a career change rather than an ending. It’s bold. Sometimes it works beautifully. Sometimes you can see the seams showing.

We’re in 1982 now, four years after Finney Blake (Mason Thames) killed his abductor and became a minor celebrity as the only kid to escape the Grabber alive. Except survival, as it turns out, isn’t quite the same as freedom. Finney’s sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) starts receiving calls through the black phone in her dreams, accompanied by visions of three boys being hunted at a winter camp called Alpine Lake. The siblings end up investigating murders that predate their own nightmare, uncovering connections between the Grabber’s history and their family that neither of them wanted to find. Off they go to the snow-covered camp during a winter storm, because of course they do.

Derrickson knows his craft. That much is obvious from the opening frames. He can make a phone booth surrounded by white nothing feel like the most terrifying place on earth, particularly when that nothing starts filling up with figures that shouldn’t be there. His camera moves with purpose, creating dread through composition and perspective rather than cheap jumps. When Gwen experiences her visions (genuinely disturbing stuff involving traumatised children), the film achieves something most studio horror won’t touch. It’s nasty work, but effective.

The Elm Street homage is about as subtle as a brick. This doesn’t have to be a problem, though your tolerance for explicit borrowing will determine whether you find it reverent or derivative. I lean towards the former. Derrickson understands why those films worked, which is more than can be said for most people attempting homage. He’s not just copying the surface aesthetics but grasping the thematic machinery underneath. The Grabber haunting from beyond the grave, growing stronger in death, tormenting through dreams… it’s all very Freddy, yes, but Derrickson makes it function within his own visual language.

Then we hit the middle section, where everything grinds to a crawl for exposition. Characters explain things at length. Motivations get unpacked. The plot’s requirements receive a thorough airing. It’s precisely the wrong approach for a film that thrives on nightmare logic and visceral unease. You can feel the studio notes creeping in, the pressure to make everything clear and justified when ambiguity would serve better. At 114 minutes, it overstays slightly, and that final confrontation, for all its visual invention, doesn’t deliver the emotional wallop it reaches for.

Still. Credit where it’s due. This sequel refuses to play it safe, which counts for something in an era where most horror gets sanded down to nothing by focus groups. The film wants to examine how violence ripples across time, how trauma doesn’t conveniently disappear after the credits roll, how survivors carry damage that doesn’t show up in scars. That it explores these ideas through supernatural phone calls and increasingly gory set pieces speaks to what horror can do when it aims higher than simple scares.

The performances hold up their end. Thames and McGraw have aged into their roles naturally, and Ethan Hawke continues to understand exactly what kind of film he’s in without winking at the camera. The supporting cast does solid work in what are essentially extended victim roles, though the script doesn’t give them much beyond being present and terrified.

In my opinion, Black Phone 2 functions best when it stops explaining itself and surrenders to its own strange dream logic. Those moments, when Derrickson trusts his visual storytelling and lets the horror breathe, are genuinely strong. The kitchen sequence near the end, in particular, demonstrates what the film could have been with more confidence and less hand-holding. It’s not as tight or focused as its predecessor, but it takes enough risks to justify its existence. Just barely.

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