©Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Released in 2021, the first The Black Phone was a remarkable horror movie because the director Scott Derrickson, adapting together with C. Robert Cargill a (quite forgettable) short story by Joe Hill, made it personal. He wanted to talk about the social-economical environment in which he was raised, and show how that universe was more than harsh for kids.

This way, the serial killer played by Ethan Hawke was in many ways the logical personification of a violent, estranged society, a world where the two young protagonists Finney and Gwen were bonded and forced to protect each other from the dark side of humanity itself. Their relationship built on fear, pain and survival instinct was so powerfully developed by Derrickson that Black Phone became a stunning family drama, probably even more than a horror movie. 

Five years later, at the beginning of the second movie, we meet Finney violently punching in the face another student who was mocking him. The way the character is introduced could make the viewer think that he, with his personal traumas from the past, maybe became another tragic product of that same environment that “produced” The Grabber. The first ten minutes of Black Phone 2 are as interesting and promising as the first episode. After that, unfortunately, everything goes south. 

©Courtesy of Universal Pictures

It seems like Derrickson and Cargill knew pretty well they had to follow the emotional journey of the previous movie. They had a starting idea about how to do it, but then absolutely no clue about how to create an effective story from that pitch. After a couple of good ideas about how to set the tone of the movie and its visual frame, when the characters move to a kind of summer camp in the mountains of Colorado during a snow storm (why to go to work in a deserted camp in the middle of winter?!?!), Black Phone 2 becomes a flat, uninteresting horror movie. The Grabber comes back as a sort of Freddy Krueger wannabe, haunting Gwen in her dreams.

The repetitions of the same situations over and over, together with at least three sequences where the characters talk about events instead of acting, make the plot not only illogical, but even worse lame. With no narrative development, the whole cast is unable to perform interesting roles, not even those Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw that were able to move us so much in the first movie. Usually quite effective supporting actors like Demián Bichir and especially Jeremy Davies are useless, if not deleterious: the scene in fact in which their father Terrence show up at the camp in order to rescue Finney and Gwen is most likely the worst moment in Black Phone 2, unnecessary and frankly distracting.

In the end, the smartest member of the cast is Ethan Hawke, who never really shows up leaving probably to some double stunts the task to resurrect The Grabber.  Another annoying side of Black Phone 2 is that Derrickson and Cargill, for no understandable reason, inserted in the screenplay a lot of explicit references to Christian religion, with characters that try to fight Evil with prayers and a good amount of bigotism. This adds to the movie an unpleasant sense of heaviness that makes the viewer uneasy, but not the way a good horror movie should do. You don’t really care if the characters believe in God, who believes, who is right or wrong about religion: you care about them escaping a horrible death, and that’s all. At least that should be all, if you truly cared about them. But in Black Phone 2, this doesn’t tragically happen. 

After the surprising box-office hit of the first chapter – more than 160 million dollars earned globally, 90 millions only in the US, with a production budget of only 16 millions. It was almost inevitable for a sequel to come. But for Scott Derrickson, a filmmaker in the past always capable of finding a personal angle to his movies, especially when it was about horror, we were expecting more. Way more. Black Phone 2 can be considered his first real bad horror movie, lacking inspiration and originality after a quite intriguing start. The way the previous movie ended it was perfect, emotionally moving and fulfilling. There was no need for Finney, Gwen and The Grabber to come back. Not this way. The most disappointing sequel of the year.

©Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Rate: D

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Here’s the trailer for Black Phone 2: