by Hudson Moura
Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2 pivots the franchise from basement horror to oneiric fantasia. After a brief prologue (“Colorado, 1957”) the film jumps to North Denver, 1982, and plants its terror squarely inside the dream-state: here, nightmares are the arena, rules are elastic, and wounds drawn in sleep etch themselves onto waking skin.
The anchor is again Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose visions—rendered in deliberately degraded, grainy textures—stage a triptych of dead boys who visit her “one by one.” Crucially, the dreams are not merely informational; they are embodied. Scratches and marks acquired in the dream persist at breakfast. Her brother Finn (Mason Thames) remains attuned to the uncanny on a parallel channel: phantom ring tones and phone voices audible only to him, the murdered boys calling back through a muffled handset. That doubleness—Gwen’s “sight” and Finn’s “hearing”—recomposes the psychic circuitry of the first film into a sibling duet.
The setting is a stroke of genre sense: an empty Catholic youth camp under a winter storm. The place is all thresholds—dorm corridors, chapels, refectories—whose emptiness amplifies each echoing footfall and makes space for the franchise’s new governing metaphor: a “metaverse” of the mind. The formal grammar borrows as much from A Nightmare on Elm Street as from the original Black Phone: oscillating focus, soundscapes that blur score and diegesis, and a sense that geography itself is a trap. When the storm wraps the camp, Derrickson’s camera conjures a mild shiver of Kubrick: the desolate hush and rectilinear dread of The Shining translated into youth-ministry architecture.
Ethan Hawke’s Grabber returns as a revenant of intent rather than a man of the basement—killed in the first installment, he now prosecutes revenge from the dreamworld. The performance is necessarily refracted: a masked voice further occluded by the mix (the score’s eerie sustain often smears the consonants), so menace arrives not as taunt but as presence—a silhouette at the edge of the frame, a logic imposed on the dream. The same mixing strategy shapes the calls from the dead boys: telephone filters and suspense cues sit atop their voices, reinforcing the idea that communication here is always mediated, fragile, and half-lost.
Narratively, the sequel’s smartest addition is genealogical: the abandoned camp touches the siblings’ mother’s past—and, obliquely, the Grabber’s—folding lineage into lore. That tie reframes Gwen’s second sight as inheritance rather than accident; it also nudges the series from simple haunting to family myth, a move that both widens the canvas and lends continuity without recycling plot.
Is it as frightening as the first film? Not quite. By relocating danger to dreams, Derrickson trades claustrophobic realism for fantastic play. The cost is immediate dread; the gain is elasticity—set-pieces can obey dream logic, the camera can write new rules per scene, and the film can be, at times, frankly fun. On that register, The Black Phone 2 succeeds: the characters remain sharply drawn, the sibling bond is affecting, and the image-sound design—granular visions, telephonic murmurs, snow-muted exteriors—tunes the franchise to a different pitch.
A few caveats: the choice to subordinate dialogue to atmosphere occasionally renders key lines less intelligible than the plot wants, and the familiar “machines/monsters seize control” anxiety—here translated into the Grabber’s dominion over the dream—could be argued with more philosophical bite. But as a tonal evolution, the sequel is coherent. It tells you what it is: a nightmare you can navigate, a phone that rings in two worlds. Less terrifying, more fantastical—a spirited shift from trapdoor horror to nocturnal fable, sustained by strong performances and tactile craft. 
Rating: 3.5/5