Studio:   Blumhouse/Universal Pictures
Director: Scott Derrickson
Writer:   Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill
Producer: Jason Blum, Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill
Stars:    Mason Thames, Madeline McGraw, Jeremy Davies, Miguel Mora, Arianna Rivas, Anna Lore, Graham Abbey, Maev Beaty, Demian Bichir, Ethan Hawke

Review Score:

Summary:

Despite his death, a supernatural serial killer seeks vengeance by haunting the dreams of the sister of the teen who killed him.

Synopsis:

At the Alpine Lake Youth Camp in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in 1957, Hope Adler, who has a psychic ability to see predictive visions, uses the camp’s black payphone to call a phone number she saw carved in ice in a dream. Hope’s call briefly connects with a voice later revealed to be her daughter Gwen Blake answering a different black phone in 1982.

In North Denver in 1982, Gwen stops her older brother Finn from beating up a new kid at their school who had teased Finn about his experience with the serial killer The Grabber four years earlier. Finn continues dealing with his trauma by smoking weed and ignoring repeated ringing from broken payphones.

Gwen dreams of a boy brutally murdered at Alpine Lake in 1957. The dead boy writes the letter W in ice before sinking beneath a frozen lake. The vision leads Gwen to experience a brief bout of sleepwalking where she hears a distant phone ringing.

Ernesto, a classmate who has a mutual crush on Gwen, gifts Gwen with tickets to a Duran Duran concert. Although other kids at their school make fun of Gwen because she claims to have the same strange ability as her mother Hope, Ernesto also gives Gwen a set of Spanish tarot cards as a thank you for her premonitions helping to find his brother Robin, a friend of Finn’s who was kidnapped and killed by The Grabber.

Gwen dreams of a second boy murdered at Alpine Lake. This boy adds the letter B next to the W already etched in the frozen lake’s ice. Gwen’s vision ends with her sleepwalking all the way to The Grabber’s former basement lair where the black phone briefly connects Gwen to her mother at Alpine Lake in 1957. Finn breaks his sister out of her trance shortly after she sees the ghost of The Grabber’s murdered brother Max.

After telling Finn about her dreams, Gwen insists they have to go to the Alpine Lake Youth Camp to figure out what is happening. Finn balks at Gwen’s idea for him to get a job as a counselor in training, even though their father Terrence confirms their mother worked at the camp in the past. Because Gwen decides to go there with Ernesto anyway, Finn ultimately joins his sister’s trip to the wintry campsite.

Due to a severe blizzard, Finn, Gwen, and Ernesto end up being the only new people to arrive at the camp before the roads are closed. Now stranded there, the three teens meet camp owner Armando “Mando” Reyes and his niece Mustang, who manages the camp’s horse stables.

Gwen experiences a third dream where another murdered boy adds H to the W and B already etched in ice. Meanwhile, Finn reluctantly answers the camp’s ringing payphone and is unexpectedly taunted by the ghostly voice of The Grabber.

Finn snaps Gwen out of a gruesome vision of the murdered boys. Ernesto comforts Gwen afterward, which leads to a discussion about Christian faith as well as the predictive dreams Gwen inherited from her mother. Sleeping alongside her, Ernesto moves to kiss Gwen, but Finn deliberately interrupts.

The next day, Gwen tells her brother that Ernesto came with her because he knows about the disturbing dreams she has been having and that Finn still hears ringing phones. Gwen shows Finn a wound on her arm she received from a grabbing hand in her dream.

Over breakfast, Mando asks the three teens why they applied for the camp. Gwen reveals her mother Hope once worked there. Mando recognizes Hope as having gone by the nickname Starlight. Finn adds that she committed suicide seven years earlier.

Mando mentions that the payphone outside hasn’t worked in ten years. Finn privately tells Gwen and Ernesto that The Grabber called him on that phone. When it rings again later, Finn receives a disturbing message and vision of the three murdered boy begging for help because they are trapped under ice.

Gwen and Ernesto pay a visit to Barbara and Kenneth, the camp’s other two staff members, to ask about the murders. Refusing to discuss the matter, Barbara dismisses Gwen with an insult about having Ernesto in her bed. Gwen returns Barbara’s rudeness.

Gwen dreams of her mother calling her on the black phone. The dream turns into a vision of a murdered boy leading her somewhere while she sleepwalks.

Hearing the payphone ringing at the same time, Finn instructs Ernesto to look after Gwen while he answers the call to find The Grabber taunting him from beyond the grave again. The Grabber threatens to destroy Finn by tormenting Gwen as revenge for Finn “making” him kill his brother and for killing The Grabber.

Ernesto’s frantic search for Gwen rouses Barbara, Kenneth, and Mustang. The four of them find Gwen being flung around the camp’s kitchen by an invisible force while, in her vision, The Grabber violently attacks her. As utensils supernaturally fly at Barbara and Kenneth, Ernesto tries pulling Gwen away from a blazing oven. Drawn there by Gwen’s screams, Finn arrives in time to rescue his sister. The Grabber fades from her vision.

Finn, Gwen, Ernesto, Barbara, Kenneth, and Mustang meet with Mando in the chapel to discuss what just happened. Barbara accuses Gwen of being possessed. Gwen tells everyone about the visions that led her to Alpine Lake. Realizing Gwen is telling the truth because she knows details about the murders that the police kept from the public, Mando identifies the three dead boys Gwen has been seeing as Felix, Cal, and Spike.

Finn ties the story together by revealing he is the kidnap victim who survived The Grabber. Finn’s connection to Hope leads Mando to recount how he was the camp’s cook in 1957 when Finn and Gwen’s mother was there and the three boys went missing. Years later, Mando bought the camp after the owner died so he could continue searching for the boys to bring their families closure. Mando suggests his prayers to Jesus were answered by Finn and Gwen’s arrival.

From a 1957 Alpine Lake group photo, Finn points out The Grabber, whom Mando identifies as a maintenance man nicknamed “Wild Bill” after Wild Bill Hickock. Realizing the initials WBH match what the murdered boys wrote in the ice in her dreams, Gwen concludes Felix, Cal, and Spike must have been The Grabber’s first victims.

Since strange things started happening at the camp following The Grabber’s death in 1978, Gwen suggests that was when the killer’s spirit returned there to feed off the fear of his first victims. Gwen adds that she believes they can depower The Grabber by finding the boys’ bodies beneath the frozen lake and laying them to rest.

Mando has his own supernatural encounter with The Grabber. He also gives Finn motivational inspiration to overcome his trauma.

Everyone spends the next day searching the frozen lake for the bodies, but they do not find anything. Following a discussion about Ernesto’s brother Robin, Finn and Ernesto take turns monitoring Gwen for disturbing dreams while she sleeps.

Gwen dreams of her mother as an adult having her own dream about The Grabber, whom Hope knows as Wild Bill from camp. In the vision, Gwen sees her mother abducted by The Grabber. The Grabber beckons Gwen inside his van, initiating a confrontation where Gwen deduces Hope’s vision led her toward The Grabber’s first victim in their neighborhood. The flashback ends with The Grabber revealing he killed Gwen’s mother and staged Hope’s death to look like a suicide by hanging.

The Grabber chases Gwen through his basement lair. Gwen’s dream also shows her The Grabber smashing the frozen lake’s ice with an ax, causing Mando to fall in as he recovers a skeleton.

At the same time Gwen experiences this vision, Ernesto sees Gwen bleeding profusely in reality, so he wakes Finn and Mustang to help. Knowing she is fighting The Grabber in her dream, Finn shouts at Gwen to fend off the killer’s bloody attacks. Recognizing the power she possesses in dreams, Gwen uses a psychic blast to explode the dreamworld’s version of the phonebooth, injuring The Grabber. Gwen threatens she will see The Grabber again.

After Gwen wakes, she, Finn, Ernesto, and Mustang rush to pull Mando out of the lake where he found Felix’s corpse. Mustang rallies Barbara to get over her belief that Gwen is a “demon child” so she and Kenneth can help find the other two bodies.

Finn and Gwen’s father Terrence arrives in a snowplow so his children can leave the camp with him. Worried for his sister’s safety and afraid to confront his trauma, Finn agrees to go. However, Gwen insists that her brother needs to stop hiding in a haze of marijuana and help her stop The Grabber’s torment.

Gwen tells her father about the vision that showed how The Grabber staged her mother’s suicide. Gwen proves her claim by repeating what Terrence said when he found Hope’s body. Doing so forces Terrence to accept that Hope and Gwen’s visions are more than mere dreams.

During the search for the other two bodies, Gwen falls asleep. While she experiences another nightmarish encounter with The Grabber, he invisibly attacks Kenneth, Barbara, and Finn in reality. With The Grabber distracted, Gwen uses her time submerged underwater to recover two sunken barrels containing Cal and Spike’s bodies. The three dead boys then join Gwen to help fight The Grabber.

Even though The Grabber is invisible to him, Finn also joins the fight against the supernatural killer. The Grabber is eventually defeated after Felix, Cal, and Spike pull him into the water below the frozen ice. Gwen kicks The Grabber’s mask into the hole with his sinking body.

With their ordeal over, Gwen kisses Ernesto. In the morning, Mando begins calling the families of the murdered boys.

As Finn and Gwen go to leave with their father, the payphone rings again, but only Gwen hears it. Gwen answers the call and has a brief but emotionally comforting conversation with her mother. Before hanging up, Hope instructs Gwen to tell her brother she loves him, and she also adds that Robin says “hi.”

Review:

“Black Phone 2” has an abundance of two things: nightmarish eeriness and continuous exposition. The amount of the latter is significantly higher than that of the former. It’s up to a viewer’s individual ability to ignore or not even notice the story’s distracting structure that will determine how deep they can be immersed in the horror.

“Black Phone 2” takes place in 1982, a setting made clear by onscreen text. It’s then made even clearer by ongoing audiovisual clues including Duran Duran references, a Peter Gabriel t-shirt, a vintage Busch beer commercial, and a clip from “Night Flight,” a show that aired music videos on cable TV, which doesn’t seem like something the featured family could have afforded or would have been willing to pay for back then.

Four years have passed since disembodied voices over a mysterious phone helped kidnap victim Finn kill serial murderer The Grabber, and the traumatized teen is exactly where anyone might expect him to be. Finn regularly smokes weed to avoid painful memories haunting his head. He lashes out at school bullies who tease him about his time being tortured. Afraid of what he might hear on the other end, Finn also ignores broken payphones that still ring whenever he walks by.

Finn can pretend the past is behind him all he wants. His younger sister Gwen doesn’t have that option. Having inherited her mother Hope’s ability to see predictive visions, Gwen has been plagued by dreams of murdered boys at a snow-covered youth camp in the Rocky Mountains. Gwen isn’t sure what these dreams mean, yet she believes they must have something to do with sleepwalking bouts that lure her back to The Grabber’s old lair. The best way to find out what’s happening is to visit the camp from her visions, an idea that doesn’t sit well with Finn. He reluctantly agrees to go with Gwen though, since her classmate crush Ernesto already said he’s up for the trip, and big brother wants to protect little sister from a hormonal boy as well as otherworldly evil.

In a serendipitous bit of luck for the script, current camp owner Mando immediately accepts everyone’s applications to become counselors in training. In another bit of luck that’s either a convenience or a contrivance, Finn, Gwen, and Ernesto also end up as the only teens at the camp thanks to a snowstorm blocking the roads and blocking them in. There’s no telling how the movie might proceed without a broken black payphone outside the camp’s main cabin, but fortunately, the location has one of those too.

Aside from Mando and his niece Mustang, only two other people work at Alpine Lake Youth Camp. Weirdly, Barbara and Kenneth aren’t introduced until almost 50 minutes into the movie, when the story is still stuck in a low gear of gradually teasing The Grabber’s return and his connection to a trio of boys butchered back when Finn and Gwen’s mom worked at the camp.

Past the one-hour mark, the plot’s roadmap becomes completely clear as the characters gather for a dialogue-soaked scene where they connect every single dot in a matter of seconds. After a harrowing experience forces everyone assembled to accept something sinister is going on, Gwen talks about the three dead boys seen in her dreams, whom Mando identifies by name. Gwen also reminds Mando that her mother worked with him when he was just a cook, while Finn reveals he was the boy who famously killed The Grabber, two facts you’d think might have rung a bell for Mando when he reviewed their job applications. Meanwhile, Mando explains how he bought the camp so he could continue his search for the missing boys. Finn notices The Grabber in an old group photo, then Gwen links his nickname to earlier clues. Not only that, Gwen suddenly understands the significance of the three dead boys, and recognizes a typical horror movie trope as she realizes they can depower The Grabber by finally putting those restless ghosts at peace.

With this bow now neatly tied around gift-wrapped explanations, “Black Phone 2” should have a detail-cleared runway to accelerate into terrifying action. Instead, the film curiously skids into another lull of lengthy conversations. Mando and Finn discuss right and wrong ways to face fears. Finn and Ernesto discuss Ernesto’s brother Robin, a friend of Finn’s who died in the first film and isn’t particularly relevant here. Inserting such scenes comes at the expense of limiting screentime for Ethan Hawke’s Grabber, which is a peculiar choice considering he was the highlight of “The Black Phone” (review here).

Secondary characters are underdeveloped at best and narratively unrequired at worst. The Christian couple working at the camp could easily be one person, or not exist at all. One of the movie’s last lines hints at a romance blooming between Finn and Mustang, except the two of them never exchange more than cursory words, much less share a meaningful scene together. Suspicious edits indicate more material might have been deleted, either in script revisions or in the cutting room, maybe to make more space for perfectly timed beats like the siblings’ father unexpectedly arriving at just the right time to get himself unnecessarily involved.

Unsurprisingly, “Black Phone 2” is at its unnerving best during supernatural stunts and bloody bites of frightening imagery. Director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill are well-versed in making macabre moments sizzle cinematically. They’re so experienced, in fact, that veteran viewers may feel déjà vu when they see the duo essentially repeating themselves by repurposing the same concept they used for their “Dreamkill” segment in the 2023 anthology “V/H/S/85” (review here), right down to grainy film footage distinguishing dream segments from reality.

“Black Phone 2’s” crossover into “A Nightmare on Elm Street” territory works well for appearing unsettling on the surface, but not as well for the familiar fiction operating underneath. The focus on excessive exposition blocks a rocky rhythm from truly taking off, and aside from a controversial alteration to how a particular person died, the movie doesn’t significantly add to The Grabber’s mythology either. With the way this one ends, it seems like the only way to bring back The Grabber a third time would be to revise his backstory yet again, and it’s not clear if the filmmakers can imagine a better idea for another sequel than the well-worn formula followed here.

Review Score: 60

Nov 5, 2025

BLACK PHONE 2 (2025)

“Black Phone 2’s” crossover into “A Nightmare on Elm Street” territory works well on the surface, but not as well for the familiar fiction operating underneath.