Black Phone 2
Writers: C. Robert Cargill and Scott Derrickson
Director: Scott Derrickson
Cast: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Demian Bichir
Black Phone, both the original film and the Joe Hill short story upon which it's based, is built around an elegant concept that, at first glance, doesn't seem all that pliable. It's a wonderfully contained ghost story combined with taut survival horror and capped off by a seemingly definitive ending, so how do you sequelize it?
That was the question lingering before director/co-writer Scott Derrickson and writer C. Robert Cargill when they embarked on Black Phone 2, and I'll admit that, as an audience member, I went into the film's Fantastic Fest world premiere with some degree of skepticism. I never doubted Derrickson and Cargill's craft (these are the folks who made Sinister, after all), but I did wonder if the sequel could possibly pack the same visceral punch as that gloriously intimate original film.
By the time the credits rolled, I was a convert — but not for the reasons I expected. Expansive, chilling, and fueled by some of my favorite horror visuals of the year, Black Phone 2 manages to be better than its predecessor on just about every level, not because it tries to top it, but because it's brave enough to go its own way.
Picking up a couple of years after the first film, Black Phone 2 again follows Finn (Mason Thames) and his little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) as they're roped into another, even stranger supernatural mystery. Dealing with loads of unaddressed trauma from his encounter with The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), Finn spends his days getting in fights at school and generally pushing away attempts to reckon with what really happened to him. But when Gwen starts having a new crop of prophetic dreams seemingly linked to a Christian camp up in the mountains, she convinces her brother to tag along to investigate. When they get there, amid a harrowing blizzard, they learn that haunted phone lines can run beyond child killers' basements, and that ghostly calls can sometimes turn into something much more.
Shifting locations from suburban Denver to the mountains in the midst of a blizzard — with only a kindly camp director (Demian Bechir) and a couple of other less friendly adults to keep the siblings company — is the first of several keys to making this sequel work. Visually, of course, it creates an immediate distinction, trading the rust-stained concrete walls of the first film for near-apocalyptic snowscapes and the chilling mystery of a lake buried in a layer of ice. It's a deliberate shift of style that allows Derrickson to work magic with blood in snow, but it's also carried over into the film's thematic concerns.
If The Black Phone was a film probing grief and how to deal, literally and figuratively, with the ghosts that torment us and the monsters that exploit our weakness, Black Phone 2 is a film about survivor's guilt, about the burden of knowledge and the duty those who still live might have to the dead. Scarred by their ordeal, hoping to move on, Finn and Gwen nevertheless still have obstacles to face and debts to repay, and Derrickson and Cargill's smart, ambitious script addresses those ideas with intense vulnerability, dealing with the emotional fallout of the first film as only the best sequels can. Thames and McGraw, but especially McGraw, who again steals the movie, rise to meet the more complex emotional stakes of the sequel, delivering a pair of great performances.
The film's emotional intricacies, arguably even more fine-tuned than those of the first entry, are juxtaposed with a palpable uptick in scope for the sequel, something opened up by the lack of direct source material for the follow-up movie. Though "The Black Phone" creator Joe Hill certainly played a role in making the sequel happen, he didn't have a short story ready and waiting for the screenwriters, so Cargill and Derrickson were left with a fair amount of room to run. What they came up with neither betrays the intimate feeling of the original film nor strays too far away from the conceptual heart of what makes this idea great in the first place. The Black Phone asked us what would happen if a dead phone line could actually hold the voices of the nearby dead, but Black Phone 2 asks what would happen if that same power cut across more space, more time, more history. Does the film sometimes pause a little too long to lay all the groundwork for this via dialogue? Maybe, occasionally, but once things get rolling and the ghosts emerge, you're too entertained to really care.
Because for all its focus on trauma, grief, guilt, and fear, Black Phone 2 is also just an absolute blast to watch. Its expanded scope, its clever kills, and its sense of humor all emerge right away, replacing the visceral, grungy intensity of the original film with shock-packed paranormal adventure. Derrickson has by no means lost his ability to wind up and release tension on an audience to gripping effect, but he and Cargill are also interested in something a bit more playful this time around, and they achieve it. It's scary, and it's funny, and in dialing up its monsters and lore, it also creates something a bit more like a horror epic, snowswept finale and all.
The Black Phone 2 is why we go to the movies in October. It's the kind of horror made for raucous opening nights with lots of popcorn and a crowd ready to scream, so see it that way if you can.
The Black Phone 2 is in theaters October 17.
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