Black Phone 2 (2025)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Dial Moan

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

For a completely unnecessary sequel, Scott Derrickson's follow-up to the 2021 horror movie The Black Phone is surprisingly good, focusing on real emotions, trauma, and coping mechanisms and building the frights from there.

It's four years later, 1982, and Finney (Mason Thames) is still dealing with the trauma he faced in the previous film, getting into fights at school, and smoking pot. His younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) is trying to live a normal life, agreeing to go to a concert with Ernesto (Miguel Mora), but suffers strange nightmares filled with unsettling visions. One of them involves their mother as a young woman, Hope (Anna Lore), at a winter camp known as Alpine Lake.

Gwen decides they need to investigate, so the trio signs up to be CITs (counselors in training). But when they arrive a storm hits, and they are stranded, along with some of the staff, and supervisor Armando (Demián Bichir). Gwen has visions of three boys dying violently at the camp, and Finney begins getting mysterious phone calls from "The Grabber" (Ethan Hawke). To survive, they must find out how everything is connected.

Black Phone 2 opens with a shocker: it's a fight at school, and we assume that Finney is still being bullied, but it's the reverse. He's the bully now. He's angry and frightened and has no outlet for his emotions. And Gwen, whose own special powers are growing stronger, often wakes up from her visions rattled and helpless. "I feel crazy!" she sobs in Finney's arms after one particularly harrowing experience.

The movie equates Finney's pot-smoking with their father's drinking (played again by Jeremy Davies, he's sober here, about to collect a three-year token); both are shown as medicating, escaping from pain. For Gwen's visions/nightmares director Derrickson cleverly goes with scratchy Super 8 and Super 16mm film footage, giving these sequences an unreal, ethereal look (not unlike the eerie feel of Skinamarink).

A deeply unsettling electronic score by Derrickson's son Atticus adds to the dread. The movie even finds a fairly satisfying reason to bring back Ethan Hawke as "The Grabber" — killed in the last movie — without stretching logic too far. In the original The Black Phone, it was difficult to get around the disturbing depictions of children in dangerous and deadly situations. Black Phone 2 has the good idea to give the power back to the kids.