Poster
Description: A horned mask lies in thick white snow,
covered in frost. The mask has empty eye sockets, a furrowed brow, and a
grinning mouth. Ethan Hawke’s name sits between the horns in black letters.
Below the mask’s square chin is the BlumHouse logo and Black
Phone 2. The 2 is red.
This
review could have been very different. A friend invited me to a private cinema
screening for their 18th birthday party. Tantalisingly, we wouldn’t know the
film until we got there! Cue lots of speculation over whether we would see K Pop
Demon Hunters or Tron:
Ares. As much as I love K Pop
Demon Hunters, I started
watching it that same day, and anything associated with Jared Leto these days
makes me uncomfortable because the man is a strange, unsettling human being. I
wanted to see something new, preferably Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein – alas, my local cinema wasn’t showing it as part
of Netflix’s limited cinematic release. A review for another month, no doubt.
As a celebration of turning 18, we should
watch a movie certified as such. So, we saw Black
Phone 2. Sadly, I hadn’t
seen The
Black Phone, so this was
either going to be an incredible experience, traumatic, or at the very least,
confusing.
Here’s what I knew: Black
Phone comes from a story by
Joe Hill, son of legendary horror novelist Stephen King. I’d seen another
adaptation of Hill’s work in Horns, which was a darkly funny and exciting turn in
Daniel Radcliffe’s career. Black Phone told the terrifying experience of Finn, a boy
trapped in a basement by a creepy masked man. Finn’s only way of escape was
through the help of the spirits of the man’s previous victims, heard through
the black phone on the basement wall. It’s a compelling idea, but my
deep-rooted dread of child-centred horror prevented me from watching the film.
Now I could not escape. Now I was in the
front row. Help.
Finn (Mason Thames, How
to Train Your Dragon)
struggles to cope after escaping his captivity. Meanwhile, his sister Gwen
(Madeline McGraw, Toy Story 4) starts dreaming about three boys getting hunted at
a winter camp. It all points to Alpine Lake, a Christian camp where Gwen and
Finn’s mother was a counsellor as a teenager. How are they all connected?
I found going into the film blind more
thrilling than daunting, until the chilling prologue and credits. The snowy
isolation is creepy as heck, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but if you find horror
films about the abuse and death of children upsetting, you may struggle.
Fortunately, the boys’ (admittedly very gory) deaths are only hinted at through
dream sequences. I liked how simple the camera filter was, differentiating
Gwen’s dreams from reality. They have a grainy, found-footage effect that adds
to the frightening atmosphere, with a sense that anything (or, indeed, anyone) could be lurking in the blurred corners.
Furthermore, when Gwen gets hurt in her dreams, she sustains the same injuries
upon waking, which is (literally, at times) very cool; however, Gwen getting
thrown around by some supernatural force in real time came across as goofy and
hard to take seriously. Herein lies Black Phone 2’s main problem: sometimes that suspension of
disbelief is difficult to sustain when you know of its predecessor’s more
grounded premise; in my case, I learnt this from my partner, who loves film as
much as I do.
Image
Description: The Grabber is caked in frost, his grinning
mask turned white on his brow, cheeks and chin. He wears a dark jumpsuit and a
high red shirt that peeks out beneath it. Gwen wears pink pyjamas with a thick
collar, and her brown hair is a short, round bob with a fringe grazing her
eyebrows. Her mouth is slack in horror. Does she know he’s there?!
With that all said, I found Gwen, Finn, and
Ernesto believable as characters – indeed, friends linked by shared trauma.
Finn is distant and troubled, Ernesto is very sweet, and Gwen is headstrong
with some creatively foul-mouthed insults that had me laughing out loud. It’s
the other counsellors that fall into familiar tropes I’ve only ever seen in
Stephen King novels: most notably the grizzled, jaded mentor, and the
incorrigible Christian fundamentalist lady. Luckily, we have Gwen’s sharp
rebukes to make her bearable.
The sequel’s main antagonist remains the
masked man, voiced by Ethan Hawke. With a face like that, I expected a
fantastic name for such a foe…alas, he is called The Grabber, which seems
incredibly weak for that much menace. It is counterintuitive, then, when he
takes off the half of the mask that covers his eyes at a pivotal moment. This
man is a ghost! Why are we trying to make him seem more human at this point?
I
went into Black Phone 2 excited, if a little nervous. The icy, isolated
setting really appealed, and the dream sequences were incredibly unsettling in
the best way. I will never not struggle to endure a film that concentrates on
the death and abuse of children, but it isn’t done in a way that feels
gratuitous. A surprising struggle was my suspension of disbelief over the more
silly “dream logic,” if that’s a thing. Will I watch Black
Phone 2 again? Probably
not. Did it make me want to watch Black Phone? Definitely.
My
Rating: 3 STARS OUT OF 5
My Sources:
Black Phone 2 poster - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Phone_2
Black Phone 2 cast - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29644189/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_the%2520black%2520phon
Madeline McGraw’s filmography - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6421259/?ref_=tt_cst_t_3
Image: The Grabber finds Gwen - https://www.slashfilm.com/1999202/black-phone-2-scott-derrickson-vhs-85-secret-universe/
Comments
Post a Comment