Black Phone 2: a colder, meaner return call from the Grabber
- In cinemas 17 October 2025 across the UK, pushed as the big Halloween-season horror sequel.
- Starring Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Ethan Hawke and Demián Bichir.
- Supernatural horror sequel that leans on late-night crowds, jump-scare jolts and a surprisingly emotional core.
- Set between suburban Colorado and snowbound Alpine Lake camp, where old murders, new visions and a very angry ghost collide.
- Explores trauma that won’t stay buried, faith as both comfort and burden, and whether evil really dies just because the body does.
Story in one sentence
Four years after killing the Grabber, Finn and Gwen are dragged to a cursed winter camp where a dead serial killer uses phones and dreams to finish what he started.
Setting the scene
Four years later, and nothing’s really over
The film picks up in 1982, four years after Finn escaped the Grabber’s basement, and that gap matters. Finn’s now seventeen, surly and numbed out, drifting through school and cheap booze while pretending he’s fine.
Gwen is still sharp-tongued and straight to the point, but you can see how tired she is of being the one who “sees things”. Their dad hasn’t exactly transformed either, swapping outright abuse for a more subtle, self-pitying mess.
The phone and the dreams start up again
Things kick off when Gwen’s visions come back with a vengeance, only now they’re set at Alpine Lake camp decades earlier. Dead boys in snow, a chapel, a frozen lake – it all plays like a warning she doesn’t fully understand.
At the same time, Finn starts dreaming about the basement phone ringing again, even though the thing was smashed years ago. The sound design on those calls is horrible in the best way, all crackle and whispers that make the whole cinema stiffen.
Welcome to Alpine Lake
In classic bad-parent fashion, their father decides the answer is a church-run winter camp “to reset”. Gwen, Finn and Ernesto – the brother of Finn’s murdered friend Robin – end up snowed in at Alpine Lake with supervisor Armando, his niece Mustang and a couple of nervous staff.
From the moment they arrive, the place feels wrong: devotional posters, locked rooms, a chapel that’s a bit too eager to talk about sacrifice. You know it’s only a matter of time before the dead payphone in the camp starts ringing as well.
Characters and performances
Finn: survivor and self-saboteur
Mason Thames sells Finn as a kid who never really left that basement. He’s taller and tougher, but he walks like someone braced for a punch that never quite arrives.
What I liked is how unsympathetic the film lets him be. He drinks, snaps at Gwen, and pushes Ernesto away, and you get why people are fed up even as you also see the giant, unhealed wound he’s carrying.
Gwen: still the moral compass
Madeleine McGraw quietly steals the film again. Gwen’s visions are bigger and nastier this time, but she’s still the one person who refuses to treat the dead kids as abstract horror props.
Her scenes in the chapel, praying and arguing with God in the same breath, are some of the strongest in the whole film. You feel the weight of asking a teenage girl to be both psychic detective and emotional glue.
The Grabber, meaner in death
Ethan Hawke’s Grabber only appears in person a handful of times, but every moment hits. The mask design is tweaked just enough to feel wrong again, and his voice over the phones is nastier, less playful and more outright vengeful.
The idea that he’s stuck somewhere between hell and the camp is a neat escalation. It lets the film use him like a curse rather than a simple man in a mask, without losing the deeply human cruelty that made him scary in the first place.
Armando, Mustang and the adults in the room
Demián Bichir’s Armando is one of the more interesting additions. At first he plays as the standard stern Christian authority figure, but the script slowly peels back his connection to the old murders and to Gwen and Finn’s mother.
Arianna Rivas’ Mustang brings a needed jolt of normal teen energy into the group, at least until the phones start ringing. Watching her go from eye-rolling sceptic to someone deeply in over her head gives the middle act an extra emotional hook.
How the film handles trauma and faith
Living with scars, not symbols
What’s impressive is how much time the film spends on the long tail of trauma. Finn’s drinking, Gwen’s fraying patience and their dad’s cowardly avoidance all feel like believable fallout rather than tidy character traits.
When the kids argue in the camp dorms about whose fault anything is, it isn’t neat allegory. It’s ugly, circular and painfully human, which makes the later moments of solidarity land harder.
Prayer, guilt and the dead boys
There’s a strong religious thread running through the film, and it genuinely won’t be to everyone’s taste. Gwen prays constantly, sometimes for help, sometimes just out of habit, and the film takes that seriously rather than mocking it.
The dead boys from Alpine Lake aren’t just plot devices; they’re kids who never got justice, and Gwen treats them that way. Her final prayer at the frozen lake is as much an apology to them as a plea for survival.
Style, scares and pacing
Jump scares with actual payoff
On the scare front, Black Phone 2 goes bigger but not cheaper. There are still “cat out of the cupboard” jumps, but most of the big jolts come from the phones, the mask and the way the Grabber appears in dreams.
One early Alpine Lake nightmare, where Gwen’s dream injuries bleed into reality, got an audible gasp in my screening. The film does a good job of making you dread sleep almost as much as the killer.
Snow, ice and a very haunted lake
Visually, moving from suburban basements to a snowbound camp is a smart sequel choice. The white landscape makes the blood and the shadows pop, and the frozen lake becomes an ominous presence long before we learn what’s under it.
The chapel and payphone are also great horror locations. There’s something deeply nasty about a cross-heavy room becoming the main stage for a revenge-hungry ghost to taunt traumatised kids.
Sound design and that damned ring
The sound work is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Phones crackle, blizzards howl, and the distant screams under the ice are mixed just low enough that you’re not always sure you heard them.
Every time the black phone or the dead camp payphone rings, the entire room tightens. It’s Pavlovian by the halfway mark, but in a horror sequel that’s exactly what you want.
Standout moments
The first call from the frozen payphone
For me, the first time Finn picks up the supposedly dead camp phone is where the sequel properly finds its own identity. Hearing the Grabber’s voice float in from that line, furious and weirdly intimate, is genuinely chilling.
The scene also sets up the rules of this new haunting cleanly. The Grabber isn’t just replaying old tricks; he’s actively adapting, targeting Gwen and using the camp’s history against them.
The blizzard and the chapel siege
The mid-film blizzard that traps everyone at Alpine Lake turns the whole place into a pressure cooker. Watching the kids, Armando and the staff barricade themselves in the chapel while the phones scream from beyond the doors is peak sequel energy.
It’s chaotic, occasionally messy, but it nails that feeling of being stuck in a nightmare where every option is bad and the safest place might also be the most haunted.
The final confrontation under the ice
The climax at the frozen lake is big, messy and satisfying. Once the kids start hacking through the ice and the Grabber manifests properly, the film stops hinting and just goes for it.
Seeing Finn literally drag the man who ruined his life under the water, backed by the spirits of the murdered boys, is on-the-nose but cathartic. It’s the rare horror sequel ending that feels earned rather than obligatory.
What doesn’t quite land
Some heavy-handed choices
The religious angle will be a sticking point for some viewers. At times the script leans so hard into prayer and divine protection that it flirts with feeling like an evangelistic horror movie.
There are also a couple of exposition dumps around Armando’s past that feel more like someone reading from a lore wiki than natural conversation.
Finn’s arc gets a bit rushed
Finn’s shift from sullen burnout to determined ghost-hunter is powerful in theory, but a touch hurried in practice. A few extra quiet scenes of him struggling sober at the camp would have helped the turn breathe.
That said, the final conversations with Gwen and their dad do a lot of work in a short time. You can see the family beginning to confront their mess rather than just surviving around it.
Who this is for – and whether it’s worth a cinema trip
For fans of the first film
If you liked The Black Phone, this is an easy recommendation. It takes the consequences of the first film seriously and doesn’t just copy the basement set-up with a new batch of kids.
You get more time with Finn and Gwen, more Grabber without over-explaining him, and a new location that feels distinct enough to justify the sequel existing.
For horror crowds in October
As an October 2025 horror release, Black Phone 2 delivers what you want on a Friday night. There are proper jumps, a tense third act and enough emotional weight to make you care who lives through it.
If you’re completely allergic to faith in your horror or you wanted a slicker, more purely fun slasher, it may leave you grumbling. But as a colder, meaner, slightly weirder follow-up, it more than earns its place at the top of the month’s box office.