🔗 Share this article

Arriving as the revived Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging their fatal ceremony. While molestation was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival Amidst Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Ghostly Evolution

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (Mason Thames) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

Finn and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the sequel also nodding regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the protagonist, continuing to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or want to know about. In what also feels like a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the same church-attending crowds that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose features stay concealed but he maintains genuine presence that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the cast. The setting is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and created to imitate the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and highly implausible case for the creation of another series. If another installment comes, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17