Black Phone 2 Review: Returned Call

There are two kinds of film fan. Those that define Ethan Hawke through his collaborations with Richard Linklater, and there are those that connect him with Scott Derrickson. Yes, Linklater brought him critical acclaim but Derrickson gave him two major career shifts. First, Hawke made his first horror film in found footage chiller Sinister, then Derrickson convinced him to finally play a villain for supernatural shocker The Black Phone. Now their latest collaboration gives Hawke a third “first” as he plays an angry ghost.

Yup, the Grabber, The Black Phone’s child murderer, is back. As he warns Finney (Mason Thames), dead is just a word. After all, the original film centered on abducted Finney being given clues to defeat the Grabber by the ghosts of his earlier victims. Three years later, both Finney and his psychic little sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), are still haunted by the events of his near-death experience and killing of the mask-wearing menace. All that trauma is simply amplified by the fact that they’re now literally being haunted by the Grabber – the metaphorical supernatural shoe being very much on the other foot.

2021’s The Black Phone was the zenith of Derrickson’s career as a horror filmmaker. Based on a short story by Joe Hill, its strength was its simplicity. He created truly innovative terrors through its narrative minimalism (a boy, a cellar, a monster), character-driven scares, and a lived-in aesthetic created through juxtaposing varying film stocks to which he added layers of gray and grime to evoke childhood nightmares. Having established the look and the feel of the Grabberverse, Derrickson doesn’t simply repeat the low-key supernatural shocks of the original. Instead, he uses that distinctive aesthetic and deploys it to radically different ends. If The Black Phone was an homage to the raw terrors of the late Seventies and early Eighties, Black Phone 2 riffs on their more polished and sometimes absurd successors. It’s like cueing up Mötley Crüe’s sparky glam metal rocker Shout at the Devil after playing the doomy sludge of Black Sabbath’s Sabotage: It makes sense once you get the vibe shift.

Black Phone 2 is also not afraid to be nakedly derivative if it adds to the fun. Derrickson’s script, inspired by further conversations with Hill and co-written by his longtime creative partner C. Robert Cargill, makes unabashed nods to the Nightmare on Elm Street films, while homaging in a few deeper cuts (Curtains, anyone?). Transferring the action from suburban Denver to a Christian winter camp quite literally makes this Black Phone on ice as the Grabber wears skates to track down his victims, and Finney and Gwen try to solve the mystery of why he’s able to come back. That said, even they can’t work out exactly how he can pierce the veil as the sequel’s expanded cosmology seems a little vague, to say the least. The basic rule seems to be “if it makes for a good kill, it’s OK,” and sadly the Grabber gets more hijinks and backstory than actual character development. It’s not like Hawke’s wasted, but he’s less terrifying than in the original, a little more Freddy in Dream Warriors than he deserves.

Derrickson seems to have put more effort into the relationship between Finney and Gwen, and the emotional burden that the events of the first film inflicted as they navigate their still-raw relationship with their newly sober dad (Jeremy Davies). If anything, this is more Gwen’s film than Finney’s, and McGraw proves that Derrickson’s instincts about her were right on the first film as she strikes a more fun tone here. Black Phone 2 may be a power ballad to the original’s minor chord metal, but it still rocks.

This article appears in October 17 • 2025.