Director: Scott Derrickson
Starring: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, Demián Bichir, Ethan Hawke
Certificate: 18
Run Time: 114 mins

Black Phone 2 is a sequel to the 2021 Ethan Hawke-starring original – my best film of 2022, but one that wasn’t screaming for a sequel with its coherent and well-contained story. Horror maestro Scott Derrickson returns to direct – the first time he’s done so, after he’d left Sinister 2 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness for others to take the helm – and writer C. Robert Cargill is back too.

Despite Ethan Hawke’s serial killer villain meeting a very definitive end at the end of The Black Phone, this sequel picks up four years after the original. Finney Blake (Mason Thames) is struggling to adjust to normal life, turning to fighting and abuse to repress his trauma. His younger sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) begins having dreams where she sees murders that happened at Alpine Lake Camp 25 years prior and receives a call from her mother in one of them. She convinces Finney and her friend Ernesto to travel to the camp to investigate, and as you might expect, all hell breaks loose once they arrive.

Black Phone 2 is a mixed bag – Derrickson is to be commended for making a sequel that doesn’t simply retread the original’s beats, but it lacks the simplicity that made the first a horror classic. The second half fares much better than the first and it’s stylishly directed by Derrickson. The decision to shoot Gwen’s dream sequences in 16mm home-video is an excellent choice, the grainy aesthetics adding an unsettling quality, which Derrickon is no stranger to given he used a similar technique in Sinister. Cinematographer Pär M. Ekberg beautifully captures the menacing mountains and foreboding frozen lake too, and there’s a chilling synth-based score by Atticus Derrickson, the director’s son.

While the script isn’t terrible, I don’t think Derrickson and Cargill quite cracked how to tell the film’s story in as simple a way as the original. The first half is surprisingly incoherent at times and there’s some contrivances you have to get around too. While Derrickson crafts an unsettling atmosphere, I struggled to fully immerse myself in the film because the story just doesn’t flow very well. Things improve in the second half once the film reveals its hand of where it’s going, and it then rattles along at a good pace towards the finale. But I can’t say I was ever frightened and I didn’t

Mason Thames gives yet another compelling performance, but this is really Madeline McGraw’s film because her character is central to proceedings. While she was the undoubtedly highlight of the first film, her performance doesn’t quite capture lightning in a bottle in the same way because there’s less at stake this time round. Ethan Hawke is reliably excellent, but he also gets less to work with this time round. Series newcomers Demián Bichir and Arianna Rivas are both excellent though, Bichir as the supervisor of the Alpine Lake camp in a role with many similarities to his performance in The Hateful Eight, and Rivas plays his daughter, Mustang.

While Black Phone 2 deserves praise for not being a straightforward rehash and there’s no denying it’s well-directed by Scott Derrickson, it’s a shame this film doesn’t have the same calibre of storytelling. The Black Phone was such a success because of how confidently it told a simple story, and this sequel trips over itself a bit, especially in the first half. But enough’s enough now – Black Phone 2 isn’t a failure to the point it stains my opinion of the original, but it’s certainly a step down.