Movie Review : Black Phone 2 (2025)
Scott Derrickson's 2002 movie The Black Phone was an absolute scorcher. Half grimy child-abduction thriller, half anxiety nightmare being processed by a ten-year-old who has seen too much of the world too early, it took familiar fears and made them feel newly diseased. It could have lived comfortably as a cult object, the kind of movie people kept recommending with a little too much intensity.
Naturally, Blumhouse made a sequel. Because money.
The problem with Black Phone 2 is not that it exists. Horror sequels exist for the same reason raccoons keep returning to the same garbage can: the system rewards persistence. The problem is more frustrating than that. Black Phone 2 is not a total disaster. It is worse. It is a bad movie that keeps wandering close enough to a good idea to make you resent it personally.
In Black Phone 2, the grabber (Ethan Hawke) comes back from the dead to settle his score with Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). In other to fuck with their heads, he choses a different venue: the frozen hellscape where he used to torment a young girl who would become their mother. As the place becomes stranded after a blizzard, Finn, Gwen and their new set of disposable horror movie friends have to fight off something that no longer has the better nature of human beings.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Watches This Movie
This is basically the winter and ice themed Black Phone movie. Everything is structured around the idea of a supernatural wintertime confrontation. It looks great, but Finn and Gwen have little incentive to visit the Christian camp where their mother once worked and even less incentive to do right by its employees. ou want to tell me long-dead children are communicating with you from beyond the grave? Great. Walk into a police station. Call a local historian. Find one adult who owns a file cabinet. Do literally anything except voluntarily travel to the most cursed-looking place in North America because a nightmare told you to.
But horror sequels have needs, and those needs are rarely democratic. So the kids follow the visions, the blizzard traps everyone, and the movie gets what it actually wanted all along: a demon fight on a frozen lake. I understand the impulse to go bigger. The first Black Phone was a basement movie, and sequels are terrified of basements. They want mythology. They want the monster to become folklore.
But a creepy setting stops being creepy when the whole objective of the story is simply getting everyone to the creepy setting. The original worked because an ordinary place was hijacked by evil. A basement became a private underworld. A phone became a séance. Childhood fear became something with walls and rules. In Black Phone 2, the setting announces itself as sinister from the moment it appears. When a place looks like Satan already has a timeshare there, the problem is no longer fear. The problem is itinerary.
If you decide to go mystery hunting there, you're not a victim. You’re an idiot.
How To Write A Sequel
The idiocy of Black Phone: Holiday on Ice is especially tragic because a sequel to the original could have worked. That is the annoying part. This was not an inherently doomed idea. The Black Phone already had one foot in the supernatural and the other in the lasting damage of childhood violence, which gave Derrickson plenty of room to explore what happens after survival. Finn and Gwen did not walk out of that story as normal children. They walked out as kids who had been forced to become experts in fear.
That should have mattered more.
Between Gwen’s visions and Finn’s hypervigilance, there was something genuinely interesting to develop. What does a psychic child become after her nightmares save her brother’s life? What does a kidnapping survivor become when his instincts are no longer just trauma responses, but the only reason he is still alive? The sequel had an opportunity to turn their damage into something strange, useful and frightening. Not superhero powers, exactly. More like cursed adaptations. The awful skills you develop because the world gave you no better options. Instead, the movie gives us the Grabber in demonic ice skates.
That feels like the cheapest possible version of escalation. The ghost of the Grabber could have manifested in memory, paranoia, imitation, family history or the terrifying possibility that Finn survived him but never escaped him. He could have become a voice in the room, a pattern in Gwen’s visions, a private logic Finn keeps unconsciously obeying. There were so many ways to make him haunt the movie without turning him into a winter-sports demon. But Black Phone 2 keeps choosing spectacle over residue. It wants the trauma to come back with a costume change.
*
Black Phone 2 wants to scare you badly, but it starts making so much noise from the outset that there is nothing left to dread. It front-loads its menace, overexplains its mythology and keeps underlining its own sinister atmosphere until fear becomes a scheduling issue. You are never really trapped inside the nightmare. You are just watching the movie insist, very loudly, that a nightmare is happening.
It is to cinema what 2008 Marilyn Manson was to music: sluggish, self-serious, cosmetically dark and running almost entirely on the fumes of a more dangerous earlier version of itself. Unlike its predecessor, Black Phone 2 is not a scorcher. It is an undead franchise object wearing the skin of a good idea.
I have no philosophical objection to monsters coming back from the dead. Horror is built on unfinished business. But there has to be some logical, emotional or symbolic pathway for that return to matter. The Grabber coming back could have meant something. He could have returned as trauma, memory, imitation, family curse or the awful private voice that survives after the monster is gone. Instead, he comes back as a lamer version of himself, which is the one thing no horror villain should ever be allowed to do.
5.5/10
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