Black Phone 2

I was one of the many people who saw The Black Phone, adored it, and was utterly baffled by the idea of a sequel. The killer was dead, there was nowhere to go with it. Then I see the trailer and hear is described as being inspired by Nightmare On Elm Street, and my response was "wait, what?". The Black Phone was hardly grounded in reality, what with the psychic dreams and phone calls from dead people on a non-functional phone, but The Grabber himself was grounded in reality. Suddenly turning him into some dream-demon spectral figure was a pretty damned big leap. I wasn't convinced they could do it. Never mind the fact that, again, where do you after the end of The Black Phone? A sequel didn't seem logical. Or necessary. To my surprise, The Grabber does work as a Freddy Krueger-style ghostly boogeyman. To my total and utter lack of surprise, Black Phone 2 is not logical or necessary. In fact, it is the rare sequel that actively diminishes its predecessor (also known as Shrek Syndrome). On the positive side, Black Phone 2 has a lot of the same strengths as The Black Phone. Scott Derrickson is a fantastic horror director. While the first act of the movie may be a touch over-long, once BP2 finds its legs, it takes off. Derrickson knows how to build suspense and use the characters' emotions to help with that. A few years on, Finn is still unable to process the fear and survivor's guilt from his experience with The Grabber, while Gwen is plagued by even more haunting, prophetic dreams involving their mother, a summer camp in the mountains, and three missing boys. They, along with the little brother of one of The Grabber's victims, all go to this summer camp in the hopes of figuring out the dreams, the connection to Gwen and Finn's mom, and maybe why phones keep ringing for Finn. But this isn't some Scooby Gang, "let's go solve a mystery" adventure; they are scared and traumatized, which plays into the atmosphere. Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw are wonderful as Finn and Gwen, bringing a believable sadness to two kids who are still trying to recover from both their mother's death and the run-in with The Grabber. Both of these young actors have a bright future ahead of them, especially McGraw, who is more of a lead here than the first movie, and she owns every moment she's on screen. But now we come to the movie's two biggest flaws. First is the pivot to being an Elm Street clone. If you've seen even one Elm Street movie, you will see that this is not a thing said dismissively. Whole ideas and sections of ANOES are CTRL-C'ed and CTRL-V'ed into The Black Phone. There is no effort whatsoever to dress up Black Phone 2's inspiration, and in a world where we haven't seen a good Nightmare on Elm Street movie in 30 years (and any Freddy at all in 16), I could let this pass. But Elm Street did a lot of work to make a world where a disfigured child killer haunting teenagers' dreams in a beyond-the-grave bid to get revenge on the parents who murdered him made sense. The original ANOES sets up rules and boundaries that make it make sense. Why is The Grabber suddenly able to invade dreams and affect the real world? Black Phone 2 will not provide that answer. BP2 also doesn't establish rules for this new paradigm. The Grabber invades dreams and things done in the dream translate in the real world, but somehow, he can use Gwen's dream to attack other people in the real world, and he also manifests, albeit invisible, in the waking world. What? Sometimes things happen in the dream and translate 1:1 to the real world, and sometimes they don't. How? There is no logic, just plot convenience. There's a time for ambiguity in horror, but if you don't establish at least a base framework for the world, then anybody can do anything and there's no stakes whatsoever, because the characters can summon a deus ex machina like they're DoorDashing a bagel. Then there's the other problem, which is the retconning this movie does and how that hurts both this and the first movie. BP2 follows the Disney Star Wars mindset of "it all ties back to itself"; information revealed in BP2 re-contextualizes events from BP1. The intent is to expand on the lore of The Grabber, but the net result is making the world seem smaller. Suddenly, either Finn's family is The Most Important Family Ever, or it's a series of laughable and improbable contrivances that bind all these people together for hashtag reasons. The effect of these retcons is that it makes the entire world seem smaller, and worse, it adds new and useless context to the first movie that nobody asked for. The story of The Black Phone worked just fine without this new information. This is some "Han Solo's name comes from being by himself in line" retconning. BP2 seems to think we all walked out of BP1 with unanswered questions. We didn't. The Black Phone was a complete story. This isn't just over-seasoning the soup, it's taking the bowl of soup you already served me back to the kitchen, adding new ingredients, then bringing it back out. BP2 is a weird contradiction of a movie. In isolation, it's good. Not great, but good. If the negatives stopped at its almost non-existent rules and blatant copy-pasting from A Nightmare On Elm Street, I could comfortably say it's worth a watch, but don't expect to be amazed. But the retconned information it force-feeds into the original movie is so egregious, it actively hurts both its predecessor and itself. It's bad enough when a movie can't justify its existence. When a movie makes another movie worse, that's so much worse. This is still a beautiful-looking movie with fantastic acting, but it's also a movie that seems intent on making you regret watching it.