The Black Phone 2: well... it'll do

      Scott Derrickson, the film’s director, is a well-known horror-maker who has given audiences hits like The Exorcism of Emily Rose (18+), Deliver Us from Evil (18+) and even Sinister (18+). But despite an obvious talent for creating original and genuinely scary stories, Derrickson’s relationship with sequels is, to put it mildly, strained: his follow-up to Doctor Strange (12+) didn’t work out in 2022, and Sinister 2 (18+) drew a storm of entirely deserved criticism.

      Against that background, expecting something outstanding from a second Black Phone would have been naive. However, calling the film a complete disappointment would also be unfair — it’s clear the team approached the project with interest and tried to expand the universe rather than simply repeat the success.

      How it all began

      The first Black Phone was based on a story by Joe Hill — Stephen King’s son. The tale unfolded in the small American city of Denver in the late 1970s, where children began to disappear without a trace (you can feel the family’s hallmark, of course). The protagonist, 13-year-old Finney Blake, becomes the latest victim of a mysterious masked kidnapper nicknamed “The Grabber.”

      Almost everyone praised Ethan Hawke’s brilliant performance after the film’s release — his charismatic, terrifying villain, whose face was rarely shown (only his eyes in a single scene), became a real highlight of the picture. In the end the film turned out to be truly successful — intimate, tense, with excellent acting and atmosphere.

      Box office over logic

      The first thought that crossed my mind when the sequel was announced was: “Why?” The story was finished, the characters had closed their arcs, and there seemed to be nowhere left to stretch it. But, as we know, box office decides everything. A commercially successful project demands a sequel — and so, four years later, we got… a new Sinister!

      Plot

      In the second installment the focus shifts from the traumatized Finney to his sister Gwen. After the events of the first film she has grown up, but continues to see strange dreams and visions — warnings or memories of the children The Grabber took. When new abductions begin to occur in the town, Gwen realizes that evil hasn’t disappeared, it has merely taken a new form.

      All of this is wrapped in Derrickson’s classic cocktail of mysticism, family drama and flashbacks, but this time without the earlier freshness and with a noticeable sense of repetition.

      Why another “Sinister”?

      Because Derrickson is once again pulling everything that works from his own hit. Instead of the tapes, it’s now “visions,” but from the visual flicker on screen to the sound cues — it all painfully resembles scenes from Sinister.

      That’s not to say it’s bad: the style is precise, the film looks expensive visually, and the editing and sound still keep you tense. But those obvious self-references are a bit nauseating — as if the director is playing his favorite record on an old turntable, forgetting the needle has long since been scraping the grooves.

      The Black Phone 2 (18+) is not a failure, but it’s not a revelation either. A good, well-made horror for an evening if you don’t expect depth or new ideas. Ethan Hawke is still magnificent, though he appears infrequently, and Derrickson seems to have simply decided to trade on nostalgia for his past successes.

      Rating: 3.5/5 — worth seeing, but only if you miss Derrickson’s old scares.