Sitges Festival Day 7: ‘Black Phone 2’ is a risky sequel with truly terrifying moments, but it deflates little by little – Film news

In 2012, director Scott Derrickson terrified us all with Sinisterone of the most terrifying genre films of the 21st century and one of those stories with an evil halo that you don’t easily forget. A decade later, the director once again won over critics with Black Phoneabout a serial child kidnapper and murderer who travels the state of Colorado with a mask and a van.

As it was not bad at the box office, the studio proposed a sequel and, although it was not in Derrickson’s plans at first, he agreed after Joe Hill, author of the story on which it is based, contacted him with an idea. Now Black Phone 2 is about to hit theaters – it will do so on October 24 -, but Tomás Andrés was able to see it at the Sitges Film Festival.

What does this second installment tell us? Finney, the child protagonist of that first part, is a teenager who is trying to have a normal life again. But, however, his sister Gwen begins to have strangers who take him to a mountain camp called Alpine Lake. Since she cannot get rid of these visions every night, she convinces Finney and a suitor she has at school to go there, even though there is a snow storm. Over there They will discover a dark secret that connects the sinister Captor or Grabber from the first installment with his family.

A risky sequel, with a good atmosphere and actors… that doesn’t quite work

Derrickson – and his regular screenwriter C. Robert Cargill – have found a way to stretch the gum. Although I was even less convinced by the proposal than the first installment, it is more risky.

Derrickson y Cargill They wanted to expand the Captor’s universe, taking it to an even more supernatural level. than in the first installment and relating the character to Finn and Gwen’s family. But the film gradually deflates and ends up falling at times into tedium and saturation due to repetition. It seems that everything happens just because and the director and his screenwriter push the characters and the narrative into a series of very palpable ‘deux ex machina’.

Not to mention its religious message. This is the director’s most Christian film since Free us from evil. The entire action takes place in a Christian camp full of religious symbolism.heaven and hell are talked about too many times and even the characters quote passages from the Bible in many fragments. For a moment I thought that by putting the murderer of kids in the Christian camp, Derrickson was trying to make a metaphor to denounce the misdeeds that the Church carried out in these types of places. But it has not been like that. His message is not subtle at all.

Positive points are its design and setting that are truly terrifying and it is something that the team has always known how to print in their works. The way Gwen has these visions, those nightmares that look like they were shot with a Super 8 camera, give you goosebumps. These scenes have an air of the already mentioned Sinister.

Another great success comes on the acting level. The actors perform quite well, especially the protagonist Madeleine McGraw. However, we only see Ethan Hawke under the demon mask worn by the captor, so that is also something we lose.

We say goodbye to Sitges with this risky sequel that doesn’t quite work, but that fans of Derrickson’s work may find stimulating.