Screenwriters deal all the time with the problem of needing to bring back a dead villain in an unexpected sequel. Gradually that’s become less of a problem, as films are now written to expect sequels, and to leave the deadness of the villain much more open to interpretation, and then reinterpretation.

At the end of Scott Derrickson’s 2021 film The Black Phone, though, the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) was most assuredly dead. His neck had been snapped by the hero, one of his escaped victims, Finney (Mason Thames). But what’s a Black Phone sequel without the Grabber?

So yes, there is plenty of Grabber in the new film Black Phone 2. But instead of saying he was never really dead, or he was somehow brought back to life, or he was a twin, or he was a copycat so similar that Ethan Hawke can still play him, screenwriters Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill have decided that he is, indeed, still dead. So the Grabber comes into the story as, a ghost I guess? Yes, he’s a ghost currently burning in hell, and he wants to make Finney and his sister Gwen (Madeliene McGraw) pay for sending him there.

Which means he can interact with them physically. The view of this, to everyone else, is to see Finney or Gwen thrashing about in the air, as if the invisible man were throttling them. Not only is this a bit laughable, but it adds a new dimension to our need to suspend disbelief. This new information may not be a huge leap after a film in which characters saw the locations of victims in their dreams and talked to dead children on the phone, but it feels like a leap for this character, who himself was at least grounded in the reality of mask-wearing maniacs who kidnap and kill children.

Black Phone 2 does have a strange innovation that at first seems worth celebrating. Instead of returning to the milieu of the basement with the mysterious black phone on the wall, where the previous film spent most of its time and which would have been the obvious thing to do, it shifts the action to a Christian camp in the dead of a Colorado winter. There are a number of strange things about this, not the least of which is that “winter camp” is not really a thing, precisely for the reasons we see here: the roads are all closed due to a terrible storm, which hits only just after our main characters have arrived there. (Never mind that Americans don’t have long enough off school during their winter to go to camp, unless that camp is supposed to take place over Christmas.)

Gwen, Finney and Gwen’s potential love interest Ernesto (Miguel Mora) have reported to the camp because Finney has gotten a job as a winter counsellor in training, a job he sought only because of a strange experience his sister has had. She’s received a phone call from what appears to be their dead mother, when their dead mother was a child at the camp some 24 years earlier in 1958. Gwen is known for her night terrors resulting from visions in her dreams – she had them throughout The Black Phone, and they helped defeat The Grabber. In these visions now, dead children are scrawling numbers under the ice at the camp, and finding the location of their bodies may be key to having to defeat the Grabber a second time. They’re taken in by the camp director (Demian Bichir), who may know more about these events than he’s letting on.

Black Phone 2 has a restlessness with its style that is occasionally captivating but more often reflects the film’s indecisiveness. Recognising the certain visceral power to seeing horror images via 1982 Super 8 home video footage, Derrickson dips in and out of this medium with some regularity, but not always with a clear purpose in any given moment. “This would look cool” seems to be the extent of the thought that’s gone into it.

It’s also trying to mask the fact that not a lot is happening here. Simply put, there’s a lot of talking in Black Phone 2. There’s also a lot of repetition of scenes. The number of times Gwen sleepwalks, or comes into the room in the middle of the night to report she’s had a bad dream, is almost comical, a fact that the characters come close to acknowledging. The film is basically a succession of Gwen’s bad dreams, and they grow tiresome. With so much action in the dream world, not much is progressing in the real one.

And then we come to the Grabber. Hawke brings the same sadistic relish to the role that he brought in the original, as you can just feel his enjoyment at playing against type. But this character has a serious Pennywise the Clown problem. He has to show up so many times, without actually killing anyone, just to give him the screen time and the face-to-face time with our heroes, that you start to feel like he’s incapable of doing anything other than tormenting them – the way Pennywise torments the It gang a dozen times without actually going in for the kill.

One wonders if the only reason we even needed another Black Phone movie is because the Grabber’s demon mask looks pretty cool. It isn’t even especially a unique demon mask, but it did catch on within the comparatively realistic and contained world of the first movie. Black Phone 2 has had its logic opened up beyond its ability to manage it, and has left us a movie with unclear rules, minimal plot developments and cloudy themes. It’s no surprise it doesn’t grab us.

 

Black Phone 2 is currently playing in cinemas.