Black Phone 2
The past is never over, as long as someone remembers it, as long as there are ghosts which remain unburied; it is now 1982, four years since Finney Blake escaped from the serial killer known as the Grabber, and now his younger sister, Gwen, is suffering from nightmares which recall his own experiences, a ringing telephone, a voice from another place and time, a girl calling from the Alpine Lake Camp in the Rocky Mountains in 1957.
The voice on the other end saying she saw the numbers she dialled scratched in ice in a dream, Gwen has had visions of the same, a boy trapped under ice reaching up to scratch letters on the surface; the parallels already beyond coincidence, when dad Terrence says their late mother attended that same Bible camp before they met Gwen and Finney volunteer along with their school friend Ernesto to find the truth.
The out-of-order payphone ringing again in the night with the voices of the dead pleading for help, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies return as Finney, Gwen and Terrence alongside Miguel Mora who played victim Roberto Arrellano taking the part of his brother Ernesto for Black Phone 2, with Ethan Hawke the ethereal nightmare presence of the Grabber, still unidentified, once again directed by Scott Derrickson from a script co-written with C Robert Cargill based on Joe Hill’s short story.
As with the best sequels, this follow-up call is not merely an autodial or extension of the first, tied with the original but providing enough information that the viewer need not have seen it and moving in a new direction and location, the stunning Rocky Mountains in a blizzard (actually the equally impressive locations of Ontario rather than Colorado), the ice treacherous and misleading and blood on the snow, with aspects of The Shining, Ghost Story and A Nightmare on Elm Street, particularly Dream Warriors.
With Alien: Covenant’s Demián Bichir as Armando, camp supervisor, and Arianna Rivas as his niece Mustang, they are believers who ally themselves with the kids, Gwen’s dream sequences encompassing and inescapable, sequences dark and grainy in suffocating contrast to the icy sharpness of the mountain camp, cut off by snowdrifts and source of the Grabber’s lingering power, a cold place where the voice on the telephone warns that “fear is just the warm up.”
An effective melange of moods and styles, of survivors’ guilt and anger and the refusal to be a victim again, the shifting camera concealing and revealing the ghosts moving closer in the snow, wishing to be gone but held in limbo, Black Phone 2 captures both the eighties and the fifties, blurring them together in the nightmare world of blades and fire and ice, glassy-eyed mutilated children wrapped up for the weather gliding from under beds like J-horror escapees, and despite the promise of Alpine Camp that “Jesus Saves” it is the Scooby Gang who must save themselves.
Black Phone 2 is currently on general release
