Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Black Phone 2
The phone is ringing again, this time in "Black Phone 2" (USA/Canada 2025 | 114 min.), director Scott Derrickson's chilling sequel to his 2021 horror hit, "The Black Phone" (2021). Expanding the mythology of Joe Hill's original short story, the film leans into supernatural terror while exploring how past trauma continues to haunt the present. It's not a standalone: viewers need the first film for the emotional weight and narrative context to fully land here.
Four years after escaping the Grabber's basement, Finn (Mason Thames) is now a teenager numbing himself against trauma he can't outrun. His younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), once the sharp-tongued sibling whose prophetic dreams helped save him, is now plagued by darker visions. In her dreams, the voices of the Grabber's murdered victims return to offer cryptic clues, but so does the Grabber himself (Ethan Hawke), back as a ghost driven by pure rage and sealed forever behind his mask. Drawn to a remote winter camp, Gwen and Finn find the boundary between dream and reality collapsing into a waking nightmare.
When it lands, the horror is skin-crawling. Director Scott Derrickson's use of Super 8 dream imagery creates an eerie texture, and Madeleine McGraw delivers a standout turn, shouldering much of the film's emotional weight. What a nightmare Gwen has, especially as her dreams bleed into waking life. Ethan Hawke, unseen without the mask this time, radiates menace as a figure more frightening in death than in life.
Not every scare works. A handful of jump scares feel cheap, and the snowy camp setting, while atmospheric, can't match the suffocating terror of the first film's basement. Yet the film keeps the story grounded in trauma and sibling devotion, making it more than a formulaic ghost story. It's about how horrors never truly die, even when buried.
"Black Phone 2" opens in theaters on Friday, October 17, 2025.
