When the Grabber, the masked killer of “Black Phone 2,” makes his long-awaited sort-of resurrection from the dead, he poses a question to Finney (Mason Thames), a boy he kidnapped in the original film.
“Have you guessed what it is that I want from you?” he asks. We never really get an answer, but at least this follow-up is curious enough to inquire. Stories of suspense don’t need to, and often shouldn’t, tell us exactly why bad things are happening or where the evil comes from. But a good horror film needs to construct a cohesive world or gesture toward a lore that keeps us invested and stirs up a sense of imagination that might be more terrifying than what we see onscreen.
In “The Black Phone” (2021), mixed horror elements — dreams as murderous premonitions; a masked child abductor; the ghosts of dead children and the rotary phone from which they commune — were left scattered, each piece lacking enough development to motivate the central tension.
Armed with a new set of tricks, “Black Phone 2,” directed again by Scott Derrickson, tries to tie those disparate strands together. In 1982, a few years after Finney, now more hard-nosed, defeated the serial killer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke), strange rumblings are occurring again in their Colorado town. Finney’s sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose dreams predict the future, picks up the phone in her sleep and appears to talk to a young version of their dead mother, whose own premonitions led her to kill herself years earlier.
That call leads them to the snowy campgrounds where their mother once worked as a counselor. There, a defunct pay phone starts ringing and the Grabber makes his return. The Grabber has a connection to the camp as well, but the film curiously stops short of meaningfully contouring his origin story. What’s up with the mask? Why kids? Why the black balloons when he snatches them? Like a neighborhood myth, we’re meant to just buy into the fear, no questions asked.
Perhaps that’s ultimately for the better; while the sequel realizes the need to connect the rest of its ghostly parts, it becomes overlong in spots, bogged down by stiff explication. Instead, the movie’s engine is mostly in its new scares. Derrickson has crafted a sequel that is remarkably different from the original — up in the frosty mountains, this is more of an ax-murderer ghost chase than a trip to a serial killer’s horrific basement — and with that comes a ratcheting up of grisly theatrics.
An effectively eerie atmosphere comes from the movie leaning far more into Gwen’s dreams, creating a hauntingly fuzzy netherworld of nightmares within nightmares. And when we realize that the Grabber, like a modern if less compelling Freddy Krueger, can reach out from Gwen’s dream to attack in the real world, the film deploys violence with a more creatively bombastic flourish.
It’s enough to keep the adrenaline zigzagging. We may never know what the Grabber’s deal is, but then again, when the killer is nipping at your heels, the only thing you need to care about is simple: running.
Black Phone 2
Rated R for strong violent content, gore, teen drug use and language. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.
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