★★½ (2½ out of 4)
“Hello, Finney. Did you really think our story was over? You of all people should know that ‘dead’ is just a word.”
In “Black Phone 2,” now in theaters, those words are spoken by a masked Ethan Hawke as the Grabber, the worst kind of serial killer since his victims are children. Jump back to the first “Black Phone” in 2022 and you’ll remember that Finney Blake, the teen played by Mason Thames, killed the Grabber dead.
Or not. By the business rules of Hollywood, any film that makes money—and “The Black Phone” took in a massive global gross of $161.4 million from its horror fans—must be kept alive till the goose stops laying golden eggs. So for the Grabber, it’s resurrection time.
Amazingly, “Black Phone 2” actually improves on its hit Blumhouse predecessor, adding a touch of Freddy Krueger from the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise. How so? Well, when Hawke removes his devil mask to show a disfigured prosthetic face that proves death is no help in the plastic surgery department, you gasp. The dude describes himself as a “bottomless pit of sin” and damn, he looks it.
Set in 1982, four years after the original, the Grabber is focusing away from Finney to his younger sister Gwen, a real livewire as played by the returning Madeleine McGraw. Gwen doesn’t even have a black phone, as her brother did, to communicate with the Grabber’s victims. They inhabit her dreams with lots of hot tips, though they offer no instructions on how to kill an immortal.
But oh those visions. Director Scott Derrickson uses grainy Super 8 footage and crude 1980’s sound design to take us into what’s haunting Gwen. And it’s not pretty.
When Ethan Hawke removes his devil mask to show a disfigured prosthetic face, you gasp. The dude describes himself as a ‘bottomless pit of sin’ and damn, he looks it.
The woo-woo starts after Gwen’s dead mom calls her from a pay phone at the Alpine Lake Christian Youth Camp in the Colorado mountains, run by Demián Bichir. Gwen sees dead people (of course she does), three boys rising over a frozen lake. And she’s off in the driving snow with her bf Ernesto (Miguel Mora) and Finney to figure out what’s what.
The Grabber is also on the dream scene, allowing Hawke to terrorize us with his voice, which he does with nerve-frying menace. Dreams can’t hurt Gwen, right? Wrong. If Grabber stabs her in his visions, she bleeds for real.
It’s quite a movie year for Hawke; first he renders himself unrecognizable as bald, dwarfish songwriter Lorenz Hart in “Blue Moon,” then after that triumph he hides behind a mask for most of “Black Phone 2,” letting his voice and posture do the terrorizing, leaving audiences with the goosebumps to prove it.
There’s also an eerie Stephen King-ish aura to the scares. No surprise there since the script Derrickson wrote with C. Robert Cargill is adapted from a short story by King’s son, Joe Hill. And this demon seed of a movie feels true to its own sense of a world turned upside down and how traumas from the past visit on the present.
Derrickson evokes movie fright fests from “The Conjuring” to “The Shining,” but “The Exorcist” comes through the strongest with its two Catholic priests sprinkling holy water on the possessed girl, demanding the demon depart because “the power of Christ compels you.” You can feel that fervor in Gwen as she faces off with the Grabber.
That faith-based element is clearly central to Derrickson, a Christian convert who has said that from his earliest memories, he saw life in a spiritual way and had an innate instinct that the immaterial world was as real, or more real, than the material world.
Is Derrickson sermonizing in “Black Phone 2?” Nah. The way I see it, this filmmaker isn’t looking for converts. He’s out there, in the midst of scaring us all senseless, to suggest that maybe we’re not alone, an idea that can comfort or unnerve us. Derrickson gets both those options into “Black Phone 2,” so don’t hang up. It’s a grabber.