Film Review - The Black Phone 2 (2025)

The Black Phone 2 is the sequel to the 2022 horror film The Black Phone and again sees Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill return as director and writers respectively, Finn (Mason Thames) has been trying to live his life since being abducted by the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) but one day his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has bad dreams about an old youth camp in the Colorado Mountains and her and Finn go to investigate.

The Black Phone 2 is not as good as the first one but this is also a watchable sequel and the first reason for that is the locale, the Colorado Mountains with its abundance of snow, a near empty youth camp and a frozen lake makes for a great location and the use of blizzard like winds really helps to add to the tension of the film.

What also makes this movie work is the cast, Thames is good here like he was in the first film and Hawke is also great as the Grabber but this is really Madeleine McGraw’s movie as Gwen is much more of a co-lead this time around and she more than steps up to the plate nicely.

But where this movie does sadly fall over somewhat is in its storytelling, the Grabber was a memorable horror foe in the first film whereas here he feels more like a riff on Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street and while the film does a good job distinguishing between Gwen’s dream world and the real world the dream sequences after a while kept making me think of “1, 2, Freddy’s Coming for You” and it didn’t work as well for me because of that.

And so that was the Black Phone 2 and while its not as good as the first film I still enjoyed this sequel enough to recommend it, 3 out of 5.