You can send Black Phone 2 directly to voicemail

Black Phone 2. // Courtesy Universal Pictures

It’s never a great sign when a filmmaker’s sequel to their own film vibes like fan fiction. But that’s exactly the vibe of Black Phone 2 (“The” was apparently one word too many to carry over from 2022’s The Black Phone). Scott Derrickson and Robert Cargill’s movie retains the stilted, tell-don’t-show dialogue from their three-year-old Joe Hill adaptation. They also unsubtly borrow from a lot of other, better movies to try and justify the existence of a follow-up to a story that had a definitive ending.

It’s not the worst movie, but it is one with a lot of obvious possible fixes, which makes for a frustrating viewing experience.

Years after his encounter with The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), Finney (Mason Thames) is still struggling with the trauma of his abduction, escape and experience with the supernatural. He deals with the pent-up anxiety by starting fights with other kids at school and smoking weed—the movie’s comparison of Finney’s habit to his dad’s alcoholism leads to one of Black Phone 2’s unintentionally funnier moments.

At the same time, Finney’s clairvoyantly gifted sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) is having disturbing dreams, both about The Grabber and about murdered kids at a Christian youth camp in the Rocky Mountains where their late mom was once a counselor. Gwen convinces Finney and her would-be boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) to go undercover at the camp as counselors-in-training, but her dreams increase in danger and intensity after they arrive and are snowed in along with the camp’s owner (Demián Bichir) and his niece (Arianna Rivas).

Will past demons revive? Will personal growth occur through epic fights and trauma exposure? Do you need to ask?

Black Phone 2 takes cues from the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises, as well as Guillermo Del Toro’s classic The Devil’s Backbone. Evidence of the latter is always nice to see, and is subtle enough here that it works. In the case of the other two movies, however, Derrickson and Cargill aren’t making loving references so much as they are whole-cloth copying. The Grabber reappears Freddy Krueger-style, at one point torturing Gwen in a dream in a manner similar to Tina in the first Elm Street. Later on, Gwen discovers the power of lucid dreaming and starts somnambulantly kicking ass ala Dream Warriors.

Combined with the same stilted writing and wooden performances (McGraw, unfortunately, is not up to the added focus her character gets this time out) Black Phone 2 truly feels like what we’d get if a skilled teenager saw the first Black Phone and decided to write their own sequel that incorporated their other favorite horror movies. If you were to read such a thing on fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own, it’d get justifiable attention. Coming from skilled professionals who wrote and directed the first movie, it feels bizarrely lazy.

Black Phone 2. // Courtesy Universal Pictures

At least everything here looks good, from the shift between grainy film filters for flashbacks and dream sequences and 4K for present day/reality scenes—gracefully employed cinematographer Pär M. Ekberg—to the period attention to detail. There are a few clunky moments (if you saw the trailer, you may have already had a chuckle at the image of Ethan Hawke’s Grabber on ice skates) but most of the movie’s biggest scares are chillingly effective.

If the bad dialogue and nonsensical storytelling in the original Black Phone didn’t bother you (and judging by the fact that we got a sequel, the movie’s critics are outweighed by its fans), then nothing in Black Phone 2 is likely to bug you that much.

You may have a fine time with this movie, and it’s always nice to see horror triumph at the box office, especially when it’s made by folks who love the genre as deeply as Derrickson and Cargill do. But the idea of diminishing returns on a series that set a pretty low bar isn’t a terribly encouraging one.

Black Phone 2. // Courtesy Universal Pictures