It’s a strange world of movie viewing we live in right now. This past weekend, Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2 was number one at the box office after a tight race with Josh Boone‘s Regretting You. If you wanted to see either film, you’d have to head to theatres. It was quite odd in my mind that, yesterday, in the late afternoon, I could watch Black Phone 2 on my Apple TV. The number one movie in North America dropped onto streaming services barely a month after it hit movie screens.
I’m no businessperson, but that seems like a bad decision when you still have people leaving their homes to see a movie. Meanwhile, Regretting You won’t hit VOD until the end of November, and will bring in some additional cash from teens wanting to get out of the house and away from their parents.
As for Black Phone 2, I genuinely like a lot about the film. Its lead actors, Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames (also seen in Regretting You), Madeleine McGraw, and Jeremy Davies, do excellent work reprising their roles from the original film. Thames and McGraw are particularly exceptional, and the four years between instalments have seen them grow remarkably as actors.
Co-written by director Derrickson and his regular collaborator C. Robert Cargill, Black Phone 2 moves the story from a neighbourhood to a snowed-in camp in the Rocky Mountains, a locale that couldn’t help but make me think of The Shining. Not a bad thing, mind you, though it goes without saying Black Phone 2 doesn’t come close to Kubrick’s lofty heights. Thames’ Finney and McGraw’s Gwen are living with what transpired in the previous film, until the ghost of The Grabber (Hawke) rears his head, looking for vengeance.
There are some very cool shots throughout Black Phone 2, as The Grabber goes after Gwen in her sleep, inflicting real-world pain. The issue I had with this, mind you, was that it felt very derivative of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. Freddy Krueger has long owned the dream world of horror films, and entering into that space by any filmmaker feels a little dicey. Although never frightening to me personally, these scenes are well done, but again, they felt too much like they were working in Freddy territory. Black Phone 2 could have been titled Black Phone 2: The Grabber’s Revenge just as easily.
Teens dealing with the supernatural is nothing new, but perhaps because the current pop culture conversation is also dominated by the upcoming return of Stranger Things, I couldn’t help but feel as though I was watching an episode of that show as well. The film’s score, composed by Atticus Derrickson, is very synth-heavy and definitely has a ST vibe to it; contextually, it works, but it also contributes to the film’s potpourri of obvious influences. There’s also an early subplot of Gwen getting excited to go to a Duran Duran concert, and there’s not even a payoff of hearing a DD song anywhere in the film. As a Duranie, that hurt.
Black Phone 2 is a well-made, well-acted film that builds on the original and puts its story at its heart. While I was never scared watching it, I was also never bored. The film’s box office success could give us a third go-around; if that’s the case, let’s hope for something a little more unique, rather than Black Phone 3: Dream Warriors.
