The Black Phone 2
I didn’t have hopes initially. I saw promos for The Black Phone 2 and was immediately nonplussed. Why were they trying to continue the story? They’d already stretched the source material (a short story) into a 103 minute long movie, and the story ended with the antagonist, a human, dead. Why come back to it?
I had immediately worried that the movie would mostly center around the younger sister (the weakest thread in the original, in my opinion). More than that, I worried that the movie would try to over explain the grabber’s backstory, because there’s not much else to do when the story’s over.
Then I saw that it had good reviews on rotten tomatoes, and I let myself hope.
I am Boo Boo the Fool.
The rest of this will be in an Internet- friendly numbered list.
Things I liked
Finney.
I mean, are we surprised that Finney is number one? From the first movie, he grabbed my heart. He’s clever, he’s resilient, and he’s also young and vulnerable and audiences are on the edge of their seat watching to see if he can protect himself against The Grabber. In the sequel, we meet Finney years later, still haunted by both the phone calls and the trauma of survival. The movie almost touches something great here: Finney’s isolation, his volatility, his need to prove he’s still that kid who took down a killer. He picks fights at school, smokes pot, and drifts through his days with no real connection to anyone (and denying his connection to the supernatural- see note 3). There’s something quietly tragic in that.
(Unspoken, though begging to be explored in a better script: his only friend, Robin, also endured the Grabber’s basement, and died there. The last time Finney was able to speak to Robin was in the basement, when Robin was a dead voice over the phone, and Robin was the one who gave him the final thing he needed to take the Grabber down. That kind of survivor’s guilt and grief would shape everything about Finney’s psyche. Imagine if the film had leaned into that.)
The first phone call between Finney and the Grabber (for about 30 seconds of it)
Spoilers ahead, but let’s be honest: The Black Phone 2 completely fumbles the Finney–Grabber dynamic. Still, the first phone call starts with promise.
What made their relationship fascinating in the first movie was its asymmetry. Finney’s fear was palpable, but the Grabber’s emotions were harder to gauge, a combination of pitiful and obsessive, and always predatory. There were implications of pedophilia (“I just want to look at you”), moments of bizarre tenderness, and seemingly sincere disappointment when Finney lied about his name. The Grabber’s promise, “I won’t make you do anything you won’t like”, was delusional and revealing.
So when they speak again in The Black Phone 2, those first few beats echo that discomfort. The Grabber revels in his return, intoxicated by power. Finney, panicked but defiant, tries to disguise fear with anger, insisting the calls aren’t real. For a moment, it works, like the only good scene in Child’s Play 3 when Andy and Chucky meet again. Both stories hinge on that haunting idea: the monster from your childhood has found you again, unchanged, while you’ve spent years trying to recover.
The Grabber wants to hurt Finney from beyond. He’s always wanted to hurt Finney. Even death hasn’t changed that and if anything, it’s sharpened his resolve. He never got to “win” their game of Naughty Boy, and in his mind, that unfinished domination still overwhelms him.
And then…it gets bad. But we’re on the Things I Liked portion for now, so let me move on.
“Sorry I can’t help you”
Out of service phones ring, and there are ghosts on the other end. In the first movie, each ghost is able to vaguely communicate and help Finney ultimately escape. In the second movie, we see that Finney can still hear phones ringing.
When the film was still promising to be a good movie, there is a moment where Finney picks one up, listens for a beat, and says flatly, “Sorry, I can’t help you,” before walking away.
It’s a perfect line. In just five words, we see how broken he is. Remember how I said earlier that Finney has no real connections in this movie? He’s also rejecting the one kind of connection that once saved him.
Ghost characters being visible to the audience during conversation, but not the characters they’re speaking to
This visual device of ghosts appearing to us but not to the living characters was carried over from the first movie, and I still love it. It gives every ghostly exchange a mournful edge, like these lost souls are trapped in an echo, desperate to reach out but barely brushing the living world. I’ve always liked portrayals of the afterlife that feel shadowed, lonely, and fading. It reminds me of death in Ancient Greek myths. It’s great.
The aggressive 80s slang made me giggle
This movie takes place in the 80s and really wanted to let you know that with some of the slang used. The entire exchange about the Duran Duran concert has been living in my head.
The way dream sequences are filmed
Gwen’s dream sequences are filmed to look like old grainy, fuzzy videotapes, which feels like memories that don’t want to be remembered. The effect is unsettling and nostalgic, and it works. It reminded me of Skinamarink, which is maybe the nicest thing I can say: I liked this movie most when it reminded me of better movies.
Things I Hated
The Psychic Child Trope (Done Badly)
I know that this story traces back to Stephen King’s lineage, so the psychic child trope is basically hereditary. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Let me engage with it seriously for a moment. I usually dislike “psychic kid” stories because they often exist to move the plot along through convenient visions as a built-in deus ex machina. The trope can work, though. Example: Danny Torrance: his “shine” fits The Shining’s themes perfectly. He sees things others refuse to see, and his ability to see truth mirrors the way children often recognize family dysfunction before adults do. Jack and Wendy’s obsession with protecting Danny’s “innocence” borders on delusional. Jack literally broke his son’s arm before the story even begins. Danny’s psychic sensitivity is itself an external expression of trauma awareness: he knows, even when everyone insists he doesn’t.
Then there’s Gwen, the deus ex machina queen.
Her visions are not thematically earned, they’re like shortcuts. Worse than that, she’s always been disconnected from the emotional center of the story. The focus on her psychic dreams pulls momentum away from Finney, the actual protagonist of the first movie, and redirects it toward a subplot that is just hollow. Which brings me to my next grievance.
Finney (Yes, Really)
I love Finney, but this movie hates him.
He’s sidelined so brutally it makes you rethink how the whole series has treated him.
Let’s rewind to the first movie.
There’s that infamous scene where Finney and Gwen’s father beats Gwen with a belt, forcing her to recite that her dreams are “just dreams.” It’s a horrifying, well-acted moment, but also a gratuitous one. Reportedly, there was internal debate about whether to cut it for being too upsetting, but it stayed.
Here’s my question: if that scene had to stay, why wasn’t Finney the one being beaten?
In the first film, the Grabber already functions as a metaphor for abusive parents. His “games” mirror cycles of control and punishment: he literally plans to beat the boys with a belt. There’s a clear symbolic link between domestic violence and the Grabber’s sadism, but the movie never leans into it through Finney’s experience. Giving that scene to Gwen instead weakens the metaphor and distances Finney from the emotional core of his own story.
And in the second movie, it only gets worse. Finney isn’t allowed to do anything. The script tries to excuse this by saying he’s “in denial,” but that’s just lazy writing. The Grabber supposedly targets Gwen to hurt Finney because “she’s the one he loves most in the world.” But then the movie forgets that logic entirely; suddenly, the Grabber seems to have forgotten Finney even exists. The plot turns to Gwen’s psychic visions and their mother’s backstory, leaving Finney behind.
He gets one big moment to articulate his trauma in a scene that could have been cathartic if it weren’t buried in clunky dialogue and resolved with whiplash speed.
It’s genuinely so frustrating to watch a character once defined by his resilience be reduced to a nothing in his own story.
The grabber is back as Freddy Krueger knock off I guess
Don’t try to tell me that scene of him spinning Gwen like a top wasn’t lifted straight out of Nightmare on Elm Street 4.
This is the point where I usually become unintelligible with rage, but I’ll try to stay narratively cohesive (which is more than this movie managed.)
The Grabber has gone through several transformations: from Joe Hill’s short story to the first film, and now to this unnecessary sequel. In the original story, he’s referred to simply as Al: unsettling, but not particularly terrifying. He’s dangerous mainly because he already has the upper hand, since Finney’s locked in his basement and physically weakened. Hill’s original version of the character is honestly buffoonish, and Finney seems to hold the emotional advantage.
In the film, though, Ethan Hawke turns the Grabber into something else entirely. Tall, looming, his face hidden behind a rotating series of masks, the living embodiment of instability. Hawke’s performance makes him frightening not because he’s loud or monstrous, but because he’s unpredictable: childish one moment, seething with rage the next.
The changing masks feel like a metaphor for life with an emotionally unpredictable abuser. They’re never the same face twice, and you never know which one you’ll get.
One of the most interesting differences between the short story and the first film is in a tiny piece of dialogue. In the story, when Finney warns, “If you try to touch me, I’ll scratch your face,” Al processes this and says nothing. In the movie, the Grabber points to his mask and calmly asks, “This face?”
It’s chilling. That small addition shifts the dynamic entirely. Finney doesn’t have the upper hand anymore; the Grabber controls both the tone and the meaning of the exchange. It’s also a moment that stays with Finney long after the basement, haunting him again in the sequel when he hallucinates the Grabber repeating that same line in his backyard.
The Grabber barely appears in the first film, but every scene he’s in is unforgettable, a classic Beetlejuice effect. He’s memorable because of his absence. He’s human, but not quite. That ambiguity is what made him terrifying.
This is exactly why I dreaded The Black Phone 2 from the moment I heard it was happening. Making the Grabber supernatural felt like the worst possible choice. The power of the first story was how ordinary evil could be.
But instead of answering the few intriguing questions that might have deepened his character—
How could he afford two houses? (Actually, let’s just drop that one. It’s dumb.)
How did he view parental or authority figures, especially given what little we see of his brother?
Was his dual personality genuine dissociation, or just another layer of manipulation?
the sequel goes full dream demon. Suddenly, the Grabber isn’t just calling from beyond; he’s invading Gwen’s dreams, inflicting physical harm from another dimension, and apparently rewriting the laws of death.
It’s as if the filmmakers wanted to make A Nightmare on Elm Street but couldn’t get the rights to Freddy Krueger.
Visually, it’s pretty cool. I’d even like it in a different movie. But in this movie it served to bastardize whatever interesting ideas they had going for them.
“ the Joker killed Batman’s parents”
It’s the Joker killed Batman’s parents all over again. Writers think they have to tie everything together in a neat, tragic circle, even if it completely guts the story’s logic. The sequel decides that the Grabber killed Gwen and Finney’s mom years before the first film, which is both ridiculous and insulting. The first movie’s explanation was that she took her own life because her psychic visions became unbearable. This retcon turns that uncomfortable truth into a cheap murder-mystery twist that doesn’t even make sense. How did the Grabber know where she lived? Why would he stage a suicide instead of burying her like all his other victims? Does he even realize Finney is her son?
It’s not a tragic irony. It’s just stupid, so stupid I feel I can’t even sincerely engage with this writing, because the writing itself is not sincerely engaging with itself.
Last list: My suggestions
The better version of The Black Phone 2 would’ve just leaned into being a Silence of the Lambs knockoff. Hear me out.
You may have noticed that I haven’t actually described the plot yet, and that’s because it’s really, really stupid. But fine, here it is: Gwen starts having psychic visions of boys murdered back in the 1950s. They seem to be trapped in a lake, and she pieces together that they were killed at some kind of “winter camp” (which, sidenote, I have literally never heard of, but sure. I don’t know everything). She goes there with Finney and a new character who’s apparently Robin’s younger brother, though the movie barely remembers that detail exists.
Now, here’s what I thought was going to happen/ why I briefly had hope.
I thought Gwen’s visions and this new mystery were going to introduce a completely new story with a new antagonist. I thought the Grabber’s role would be limited to the phone, and he’d become a Hannibal Lecter type, offering clues and psychological manipulation from beyond the grave. He’d help Finney solve an unrelated case, but in doing so, he’d try to destroy him emotionally. That setup could’ve been great: the Grabber as a ghostly puppeteer, aware of things beyond his own crimes, taunting Finney with memories and visions.
In fact, when the scene began that reveals the Grabber killed their mother, I genuinely thought we were about to see the mother kill herself. That gave me the idea of what if the Grabber showed Finney the moment of his mother’s suicide to torment him? That would’ve been twisted and horrifying in the right way: a supernatural metaphor for grief, trauma, and how PTSD can trap you in your own past.
But no. Instead, we learn that the Grabber also killed three boys in the 1950s when he worked at this camp (which, again, when did this man have time for multiple houses and a full career at a children’s camp?). And somehow, Gwen (not Finney, whose entire psyche the Grabber shredded in the first movie) gets to be the main character in this dynamic.
The Black Phone 2 isn’t just a bad sequel. I could forgive it if that’s all it was. But really, it’s a symptom of modern horror’s identity crisis. Hollywood can’t stand to let anything actually end. Every self-contained story has to be dragged out and called a franchise. The Grabber was never supposed to be a “horror icon.” That was literally the point: he was terrifying because he was human. Turning him into a dream-demon knockoff doesn’t make him the next Freddy Krueger, it just proves the filmmakers didn’t understand what made him scary in the first place.
And that’s really the state of horror right now. The only new “icons” in recent memory are M3GAN and Art the Clown and they earned their status through a mix of meme-able camp and shock value. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it says a lot that our modern pantheon is split between irony and extremity. The Grabber doesn’t fit either category, and making him supernatural is like adding Jason Voorhees to Silence of the Lambs. It’s stupid.
The Black Phone 2 is proof that Hollywood Horror doesn’t know how to tell stories anymore. It’s all franchise and expansion.
(PS: Joe Hill I really enjoy your writing, please don’t get mad at me for this review.)
(PPS: how come nobody has the same name as their character from the short story? In the story Finney’s name is John Finney, his sister is Susanna, and the Grabber is Al. Here we have Finney (first name), Gwen, and Bill. This isn’t necessarily a complaint I’m just genuinely confused why this was changed)
(PPPS: seriously are winter camps a thing?)