Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: If you die in your dream, you die for real. Scott Derrickson’s burgeoning Black Phone series is derivative by design. The 2021 flagship entry adapts Joe Hill’s short story of the same name; The Black Phone is a severe but treacly reduction of Stephen King’s haunted Americana. It takes place outside of Denver, but it may as well be Derry — bikes, bullies, and the abusive parents of broken homes abound. Its follow up, Black Phone 2, sets its sight on another pillar of American horror: the nightmare world of Freddy Kreuger.
It’s 1982, four years since the first Black Phone, and Finn (Mason Thames) is going through it. Not that anyone would blame him — his high school career has been defined by his killing of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), the pedophilic serial killer who’d kept Finn locked in a basement in the first movie. Once a wallflower, Finn now staves off his PTSD with ditch weed and parking-lot brawls; “the bloodier the better,” he tells his sister, recalling the advice of a street-smart friend who’d lost his own life to The Grabber.
Finn isn’t the only one who’s changed. His dad (Jeremy Davies) has sobered up in the years between, and his sister, Gwen (Madeline McGraw), is increasingly rattled by strange and prophetic dreams. Those visions, a gift (or curse, if you ask her) inherited from her late mother, saved Finn’s life in The Black Phone. Now, they’re drawing her to camp: a teenage version of Gwen’s mother contacts her via dreamscape from Alpine Lake, a wintry Christian retreat she used to work in her Coloradan youth. Gwen’s learned these visions only come under the shadow of evil, so she, her friend, Ernesto (Miguel Mora), and Finn pack it up and head into the mountains.
Against The Black Phone’s after-school coming-of-age story, Black Phone 2 is decidedly dark — at times, it even crests the terror of its classic-horror mood board. Shortly after arriving at Alpine Lake, Finn walks past a ringing payphone. A dead phone in The Grabber’s basement had connected Finn to the spectral voices of victims past, and he can’t pass a phonebooth now without a shudder. His fears are confirmed when he picks up the receiver: it’s The Grabber, calling from the depths of Hell, bent on returning to cause Finn as much pain as his ghost can deal.
Plummeting its villain to the realm of the undead requires something of a genre shift for The Black Phone series. The first entry functions as a supernatural young-adult thriller, borrowing as many machinations from The Hardy Boys as it does the King family’s horror empire. Off the heels of Stranger Things’ industrial nostalgia, The Black Phone slogs through a catalogue of inherited memory as exhausting as it is exhaustive — here a “Free Ride” needle drop, there a fixed-gear pursuit through sepia-toned suburbia, touchstones as universal and impersonal as an episode of I Love the ‘70s. Its sequel makes room for its own indulgences (Duran Duran, “death to disco”), but Alpine Lake’s icy seclusion largely frees Black Phone 2 from the commerce of sentimentality and allows its focus to settle on fear. Finally, horror.
And many of those scares are good. Gwen’s dreams are the conduit to the good and evil of the other side, which puts her at the center of the film’s attention; her visions are shot with eerie, grain-forward textures that recall Skinamarink as much as they do home movies. These sequences find Black Phone 2 at its strongest — to see a masked Ethan Hawke seethe his way through distorted shadows, armed with the discordant menace of nightmares, is to see The Grabber escape his own self-parody.
Scott Derrickson adequately and admirably taps dream logic to knock what’s largely a conventional horror flick on its back leg. Dead children float in and out of frame without boundary, blood funnels out of tree stumps, and the divide between somnambulance and waking life blurs until the wounds of the dream world fester on material bodies. The evils of the first Black Phone were hobbled by the uneven execution of a neighborhood pariah (he grabs people, thus, “The Grabber”). Hawke can’t shake the goofy name, but trading across supernatural borders allows his character to fully bloom into fright.
Still, Black Phone 2 can’t outrun the script problems that dog its progenitor. Derrickson and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill approach exposition as if it’s a monolith that had descended upon their movie — one offending scene trails for minutes and clogs the film’s pacing like a clot in an artery. Derrickson and Cargill have a long working history, including 2016’s Doctor Strange, and the pair can’t resist peppering dialogue with Marvelist groaners; Gwen’s penchant for Deadpool-flavored portmanteau swears (“jizzmop,” “cuntwagon”) are particularly tiresome.
What may have been forgivable nits bleed into larger problems with Black Phone 2’s narrative arc. Gwen’s eventual rise against the Grabber is predicated on her realizing that, like with her adversary, the dream world imbues her with as much power as her imagination can afford. That superhero strength comes at the cost of the film’s stakes. As the faceoffs between the kids and The Grabber become increasingly unwieldy, the story can feel no more consequential than suffering through a description of someone else’s dream.
But putting Black Phone 2 under the microscope feels antithetical to its mission to play the hits, which, by and large, it does well. Ethan Hawke’s oeuvre makes little room for him to play the bad guy, and he rises to Freddy Krueger’s mantle with aplomb. Obscuring his face with a hannya mask demands a fully physical performance, and it’s a welcome opportunity to see Hawke let his hair down and defy the nuance that categorizes his weightier films. It’s hard to imagine Black Phone 2 aging into the canon alongside its North Star — that’s The Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, a movie that budgets enough camp to create a dream world as kinetically silly as it is compelling. But for anyone hoping to see Krueger’s nightmares ripple to the surface of contemporary horror, Black Phone 2 hits its marks.
DIRECTOR: Scott Derrickson; CAST: Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Demián Bichir; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
Comments are closed.