Black Phone 2
I am very much a Scott Derrickson fan- and especially, his collaborations with C. Robert Cargill- so it is not a shock to me that I am a fan of their follow-up to their 2022 Joe Hill story adaptation, “Black Phone 2”; whether it’s “Sinister” or “Doctor Strange” or the first “Black Phone,” each one pushes all the right buttons in the moment for me. It is the ways in which “Black Phone 2” transforms the story of the original film, and has some clear references to iconic horror films past, that I dug it as much as I did. I would almost say I probably like it more than the first film, which is quite shocking.
The story begins, nominally, four years after Finney (Mason Thames) was taken by The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), and was able to get away and kill him; along with his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), they helped reveal The Grabber’s crimes, and set some people at peace. Now, Finney is an “angry-at-the-world” teenager who smokes weed to calm himself, and- when he hears a black phone ringing in public- answers it, and Gwen is haunted by dreams that feel a lot like visions. She’s specifically haunted by three boys in a frozen lake, and a phone call with a young woman at an isolated youth camp. In the opening scene, we see the other side of that call; the woman’s name is Hope (Anna Lore), Finney and Gwen’s mother, who killed herself seven years prior. They are drawn to that camp, and with the brother of one of The Grabber’s victims, Ernesto (Miguel Mora), they go up to the camp under the guise of training to be counselors, but are really trying to solve the mystery of these visions.
One of my favorite films of Derrickson’s is “Sinister.” His first collaboration with Cargill (and Hawke), they made a psychological horror thriller that was also bloody and infused with mystery. One of the conceits in that film was the old film stock for the snuff film murders of the other families that Hawke watches. Here, Derrickson and cinematographer Pär M. Ekberg use a similar aesthetic for the dream sequences, and it works in stark contrast to the more straightforward filming of the rest of the film, but it also helps capture the time of the film. The events of these films are in the late ’70s/early ’80s, they also accomplish what the device in “Sinister” did- make us feel like we’re watching something otherworldly, that doesn’t play by the same rules as the real world, but it does still have rules. Derrickson knows how to twist the knife in these sequences, which owe more than a debt to “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and I am here for it.
I have mentioned before how I am a sucker for movies with snowy settings. Here, the camp is in the Rocky Mountains, and it is at a time where the roads get blocked off because of excessive snowfall. That means no escape. Granted, that seems like a particularly strange time for having camp counselor training, let alone camp, but I’ll take the suspension of disbelief because I love when protagonists are trapped in their surroundings. My favorite horror film of all-time in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” and it very much appears to be one of the ones that Derrickson is referencing here, as well; another one is “Friday the 13th.” Both of those seem in play for inspiration here, as Finney, Gwen and Ernesto are trapped at the camp with the director, Armando (Demián Bichir), his niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas), and two administrative individuals (Maev Beaty and Graham Abbey), who seem to be the most religious of the bunch, and naturally gravitate towards feeling like Gwen is possessed by a demon when weird shit starts happening. Finney gets phone calls at a long-defunct pay phone, and the children of Gwen’s dreams were clearly killed here. What do The Grabber and their mother have to do with this? Not everything is as it seems.
“Black Phone 2” takes some big swings in terms of worldbuilding and deepening the lore of Hill’s original narrative, and even though it feels overlong at 114 minutes, I really enjoyed each and every swing. This might be Derrickson’s best horror film to date, and I’m curious to see if he and Cargill have more ideas of how to keep moving this franchise forward. There’s some potential here, and I’m interested to see where it takes them in the future.
