Black Phone 2 (2025) | Review

Remember when your mom told you nothing good ever happens after midnight? Well, nothing good happens after a surprise $161 million box office hit either, especially when you’re working from a Joe Hill short story that barely had enough gristle for one movie, let alone two. (Read our review of Black Phone here.)

Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2 arrives like a collect call you really should’ve let go to voicemail. The original was already teetering on the edge of self-indulgent pastiche—think Stephen King’s greatest hits played on a Fisher-Price record player—but at least it had a creepy vibe going for it. This sequel is what happens when you try to turn a one-note killer into the next Freddy Krueger without any of the creativity, charisma, or killer one-liners.

Horror has a long, illustrious history with telephone terror. When a Stranger Calls (1979) gave us that primal fear of “the call is coming from inside the house.” Black Christmas (1974) turned obscene phone calls into art-house dread. Scream made landlines lethal while deconstructing the entire genre with wit and intelligence. Hell, even The Ring understood that the phone was just a delivery mechanism for genuine existential horror—seven days and you’re done, no refunds. Even the criminally underrated One Missed Call (the original Japanese version, not that gawdawful American remake) knew how to wring dread from a ringtone.

Black Phone tried to join this legacy by making the phone a conduit for ghostly advice from beyond the grave, which was… fine, I guess? A little overwrought, but it had its moments. Black Phone 2, meanwhile, pretty much abandons the phone gimmick entirely in favor of dream sequences and heavy-handed religious symbolism. It’s like if Scream 2 decided Ghostface should actually be a ghost.

Black Phone 2 commits the cardinal sin of explaining too much. The Grabber worked best as a terrifying cipher in a creepy mask. Now Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill feel compelled to give us his origin story, complete with enough exposition to make M3GAN 2.0 look subtle. They’ve essentially Elm Street-ed their villain, giving him dream powers and supernatural abilities, but forgot the most important ingredient: making him interesting. Without Hawke’s camp performance from the first film the Grabber is about as threatening as a telemarketer.

At least Freddy had personality. At least he had something to say beyond heavy breathing and ominous pronouncements. The Grabber in this film is a supernatural void; not in a scary cosmic horror way, but in a “the script has nothing for him to do” way. He shows up, menaces people through needlessly confusing dream logic, and disappears again. Rinse, repeat, bore. It’s the horror equivalent of a Zoom meeting that should’ve been an email. The man has genuine presence (we’ve seen it in everything from Sinister to Moon Knight) but here he’s been reduced to a voice in a mask and the occasional blurry figure in the background. What a waste.

The plot drags our survivors—Finn (Mason Thames, sadly sidelined despite being the Final Boy of the first film) and his perpetually swearing sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw)—to a Christian alpine camp, because apparently we’re also doing a Friday the 13th homage now. The script is so busy juggling religious symbolism, dream logic, backstory revelations, and convoluted rules about who can appear where and when that it forgets to be, you know, scary. Or fun. Or coherent. I spent more time trying to figure out the mythology than actually caring about anyone’s survival.

The religious angle feels particularly cynical, like Derrickson watched the Conjuring movies print money and thought, “Hey, we should get some of that Christian audience cash!” But the Conjuring films, whatever you think of their quality, at least committed to the bit. They built their scares around faith as a weapon against evil. Here, it’s just window dressing slapped onto a franchise that was never about that in the first place.

And can we talk about Gwen’s dialogue? The constant F-bombs might’ve landed once or twice in the first film as shock value, but here it’s like Derrickson discovered the word “fuck” and decided to make it 30% of her vocabulary. It’s not edgy; it’s exhausting. It’s the horror movie equivalent of that kid in middle school who just learned to swear and thinks it makes them cool.

The film also makes the baffling choice to filter dream sequences through a grainy 8mm texture that screams “Look how stylish we are!” (and is reminiscent of Sinister) but actually just makes everything look like a bad Instagram filter. Real nightmares don’t come with visual warnings that you’re about to see something scary—they just are scary. This aesthetic choice is so self-consciously artsy that it pulls you right out of whatever meager tension the film manages to build. It’s like watching someone’s pretentious film school project, except it cost millions of dollars and somehow got released nationwide.

The scares themselves and basically nonexistent. Jump scares with no build-up. “Spooky” imagery that feels focus-grouped. Set pieces that lumber along without any sense of momentum or danger. For a film about a killer who can invade dreams, there’s shockingly little imagination on display. Say what you want about the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels—yes, even The Dream Child—but at least they swung for the fences with their dream logic. This just… sits there.

At nearly two hours, Black Phone 2 is proof that Blumhouse is desperately clutching for a win after this year’s string of failures (Wolf Man, The Woman in the Yard, Drop, and the box office bomb that was M3GAN 2.0). Unfortunately, this ain’t it. It’s a bloated, over-explained, under-scary mess that takes everything vaguely effective about the original and drowns it in unnecessary mythology and religious posturing.

The first Black Phone was already King-lite fanfiction (checks out: Hill is, after all, the master of horror’s son) stretched past its breaking point—a 70s small-town setting, psychic kids, a gnarly neighborhood villain, all the hits. This sequel is what happens when you try to franchise the unfranchisable. It’s the horror equivalent of trying to make When a Stranger Calls into a cinematic universe. Some stories work best as one-offs. Some villains should stay dead. Some phones should just go unanswered.