Synopsis
Four-time Academy Award® nominee Ethan Hawke returns to the most sinister role of his career as The Grabber seeks vengeance on Finn (Mason Thames) from beyond the grave by menacing Finn’s younger sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw).
As Finn, now 17, struggles with life after his captivity, the headstrong 15-year-old Gwen begins receiving calls in her dreams from the black phone and seeing disturbing visions of three boys being stalked at a winter camp known as Alpine Lake.
Determined to solve the mystery and end the torment for both her and her brother, Gwen persuades Finn to visit the camp during a winter storm. There, she uncovers a shattering intersection between The Grabber and her own family’s history. Together, she and Finn must confront a killer who has grown more powerful in death and more significant to them than either could imagine.
Review (Scott McCutcheon 16/10/25)
The Black Phone (2021), for some strange reason they’ve decided to drop The and call the sequel Black Phone 2, was a breath of fresh air in that it was a horror film with an original story that didn’t, like so many horrors, just rely on jump scares to terrify the audience.
Sadly, Black Phone 2 has fell into the jump scare trap with more in the first 20 minutes than there was in the whole of the original. Gwen’s (Madeleine McGraw) dreams, and there’s a lot of dreams, too may in fact, are peppered with ghosts jumping out of various strange places for no apparent reason other than trying to terrify the audience.
Madeleine McGraw, who was the stand out in the first film, now takes centre stage with Finn (Mason Thames) almost relegated to a secondary character. Ethan Hawke, as The Grabber, is so unrecognisable this time that it makes you wonder if they used a body double with him phoning in his lines during a spare afternoon in production.
With it’s slow pacing, overall reliance on CGI generated dream sequences, Black Phone 2, much like Megan 2.0 from the same studio, has to go down as a disappointment