Review | Black Phone 2 movie review: Ethan Hawke returns as a child kidnapper in unsettling sequel
Ethan Hawke is back from the dead as child killer The Grabber, this time in a snowbound camp, in this gory supernatural horror film
3/5 stars
The director has made a career from scares in films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister. The Black Phone reunited him with the latter’s star, Ethan Hawke, playing a late-1970s Colorado child kidnapper nicknamed The Grabber. It was a disturbing dive into darkness.
That film was largely confined to the scruffy basement where Hawke’s serial killer held his victims, its only decoration of note being the titular disconnected phone that mysteriously allowed contact with the spirits of the children he had abducted.
Derrickson ramps things up in the equally troubling sequel, changing locations to an American alpine camp during the worst blizzard in the area since 1946.
Once again, the central figures are Finney (Mason Thames), the Grabber’s only known survivor, and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who still live with their father (Jeremy Davies), now three years sober.