Film Review: BLACK PHONE 2 (2025): Horror Sequel Suffers Due to Too Few Scenes Featuring Ethan Hawke’s “The Grabber”
Black Phone 2 Review
Black Phone 2 (2025) Film Review, a movie directed by Scott Derrickson, written by Joe Hill, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill and starring Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, Arianna Rivas, Miguel Mora, Demian Bechir, Anna Lore, Simon Webster, Jacob Moran, Maev Beaty, Shepherd Munroe, Dexter Bolduc, Graham Abbey and Chase B. Robertson.
Over a decade ago, Scott Derrickson directed a masterpiece called Sinister which was one of the best horror movies of all-time. However, his new sequel to his decent recent horror movie, The Black Phone, suffers from a lack of focus and a series of needless scenes that go on way past their welcome. Black Phone 2 does feature Ethan Hawke reprising his role as “The Grabber” from the original film, but getting to his scenes here is something like looking for a needle in a haystack for a while until he finally shows up ice skating his victims around in some solid, albeit cheesy, scary scenes. It ultimately feels like too little, too late, though, in a movie that runs nearly 2 hours long.
Mason Thames is present as Finney yet again, but this movie decides to focus on the young Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) who has frightening visions that make a scary re-appearance in the real world. Black Phone 2 borrows heavily from In Dreams, the old A Nightmare on Elm Street films and, towards its schmaltzy conclusion, The Sixth Sense. This new movie opens with Gwen’s mom as a young lady taking a scary phone call before skipping ahead to the early 1980’s where a Duran Duran concert is pretty much where it’s “at” for the teenagers in the picture. Gwen curses out her brother as she’s asked out by a sweet guy, but this movie mainly revolves around three missing kids who Gwen ultimately leads a search party to find.
I really enjoyed the style Derrickson employs here regarding the phone call scenes from the great beyond where the missing kids and the Grabber telephone Gwen in the booth. This movie shows the callers creeping outside the phone booth as Gwen talks to them in fear. Her life seems to be more in jeopardy when she sleeps though then when she talks to spooky souls on the telephone.
Set around a winter camp, Demian Bechir pops up as Mando who may try to help the kids take on the Grabber if he ever shows up. Waiting for the scenes showcasing the Grabber is a chore in and of itself. You see, the Grabber is now burning in hell and only appears to try to kill people in their visions a la Freddy Krueger. His fake teeth look creepier than usual until you see his real teeth and realize the first Grabber has nothing on the creep factor of the later Grabber that appears towards the end.
Jeremy Davies once again appears as the dad who must confront the fact that the kids’ mom was led to suicide by the Grabber. Revenge could be Gwen’s, but one will wish that vengeance would come much sooner than it arrives in this bloated horror picture.
Ethan Hawke is satisfactorily freaky in his scenes when he eventually shows up, but as he’s skating an unfortunate character around the ice, it all plays a bit goofier than it could have. That’s because the Grabber used to be the star of the show, now he’s just a side character in the action with the real focus being on the mysterious plot points of finding the missing kids and discovering the details regarding the mother’s untimely death.
Black Phone 2 has unique sequences that work well. Most of them come later in the picture. We get scenes of the older Barb (Maev Beaty) calling Gwen “Satan’s child,” as she flies around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, but much of the detective work that’s done by the characters in the movie could have been bypassed for more scenes of the twisted “Grabber” making his appearance in Gwen’s dreams coming straight from hell. In the best scene of the picture, the Grabber explains the realities of hell in a nutshell. The concept of “hell” never seemed more disturbing than the way it’s talked about in this picture.
Madeleine McGraw does solid work and is supported by Mason Thames sufficiently. Gwen curses out people in weird ways that feel like the character thought too hard about her put-downs of others without the need for a filter. She says crazy things about multiple people in this film that feel like scriptwriters penning phrases that people would never say in real life.
Despite its flaws, Black Phone 2 does end well. It has a The Sixth Sense vibe at the conclusion as Gwen finally answers the ringing phone with positive results and it turns out to be someone other than the Grabber or the missing kids. Since there are not many payphones left today, setting the movie in the 1980’s was pivotal to it working as a picture.
Hawke continues to succeed in a role which he probably won’t play again, but it was fun seeing him in this part for these two pictures. Derrickson has scarier movies in his bones, and it will be interesting to see what he does next. Black Phone 2 is more style than substance, but it has its moments of terror which die-hard horror fans will enjoy.
Rating: 6.5/10
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