Black Phone 2

The Cold at the End of the Line

I can barely remember the last time I heard a real rotary phone ring. It has that dense mechanical chatter digital sounds can’t fake, like a machine insisting on its own weight. In Scott Derrickson’s first *Black Phone*, that sound trapped us in a suburban basement with a kidnapped boy and nowhere to go. *Black Phone 2* yanks the whole idea out into the frozen Rockies instead. Practical questions—like why a ghost would still need a landline—get waved away, and honestly that’s fine. The movie is more interested in mood than logistics. We’re four years past the first film, and Finney (Mason Thames) plus his psychic sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) are trying to survive high school when Gwen’s visions start pulling them toward Alpine Lake, a winter camp buried in wind, snow, and 1980s dread.



Derrickson isn’t trying to bottle the exact same claustrophobia again. He’s going for something grander and frostier. Early on, Ethan Hawke’s Grabber—no longer just a man, now more like a malignant force—announces that hell is made of ice, not fire. The Dante cue is explicit: Cocytus, the frozen lake at the bottom of *Inferno*. The movie takes that idea seriously. The warm, grimy browns of the first film are gone, replaced by bruised blues and damp grays that seem to seep out of the screen. The best visual choice comes in Gwen’s dream sequences, which Derrickson shoots on rough Super 8mm stock. The image stutters, flares, and burns at the edges as if the memories themselves are decaying while she watches them.



The dreams are where the movie really clicks. In one standout sequence, Gwen stands barefoot on a frozen lake at night. Derrickson keeps the camera low, almost at a child’s eye line, and strips the soundscape down until the crunch of snow under her feet feels deafening. Then the film grain seems to rot in place. Out of the trees comes the Grabber, moving with a sick, jerky rhythm that doesn’t seem to belong to the landscape around him. Hawke wears a new distortion of Tom Savini’s mask, but the scariest part is the lack of rush. He doesn’t charge. He tilts his head, lets disappointment droop through his shoulders, and points. The terror comes from the sense that time is entirely on his side.



Hawke is fascinating here because he has almost nothing but posture to work with. The character no longer has the ordinary menace of a living body, so Hawke turns his spine and hands into the whole performance—curled inward, hanging loose, wrong in a way that reads instantly. Thames gives Finney a different kind of tension. He plays him like a teenager whose survival has curdled into anger: jaw set, shoulders braced, walk heavy as if he’s always expecting impact. McGraw remains the grounding force. Her Gwen isn’t some polished young mystic; she’s awkward, irritated, and tired of carrying a gift nobody asked for. The supporting cast is thinner than it should be—Demián Bichir, especially, feels stranded in a barely-written authority role—but the three leads keep the movie emotionally upright.

The thing does wobble once it starts spelling itself out. By turning the Grabber into something closer to an Elm Street dream demon, Derrickson gives up some of the first film’s nastiest power: the banal terror of a real predator. Matt Singer at ScreenCrush was fair to say Derrickson "relies on [retro horror vibes] for too long and with too little variation." The second half gets chatty about the supernatural rules, and trauma rarely comes packaged with that kind of explanatory neatness. Still, messy ending and all, the movie understands one hard truth. Surviving horror doesn’t mean it stays behind you. Sometimes it keeps moving through your body like weather. Sometimes all you can do is learn how to be cold.