“Black Telephone 2”, sequels and repetitions | Directed by Scott Derrikson

Black telephone 2 – 6 points

Black Phone 2United States, 2025

Address: Scott Derrickson

Script: C. Robert Cargill y Scott Derrickson

Duration: 114 minutes

Interpreters: Thames, Madelaine McGraw.

Available exclusively in theaters.

As usual in the era of aftermaththe arrival in cinemas of black phone 2 It is not a surprise, but the foreseeable consequence of an industry increasingly less willing to take risks. Which in the end would be the least of it, because no one can blame entrepreneurs for their obsession with minimizing the statistical variables of failure. But cinema is a mixed discipline in which industrial genes merge with those of art. And if the decision to reduce the risk quota strengthens the industrial half of cinematographic DNA, making it the dominant gene, at the same time it relegates art to the role of recessive gene. This sequel highlights that imbalance.

Although no shortage of ideas and even successfully transfers some of them to the screen, black phone 2 It does not live up to what its first part left out. The film resumes the lives of its protagonists four years later, in 1982, when Finn, now 17 years old, has become the tough kid at school who everyone is afraid of. The experience of having been kidnapped by a serial child killer and having survived the experience thanks to a paranormal phenomenon was not free. The same goes for his younger sister, Gwen, who helped save him thanks to the gift of her clairvoyant dreams.

If the first part narrated in the present tense the traumatic event that the brothers were going through, the second can be seen as the staging of what is known as post-traumatic stress. That is, the psychological consequences that mark and obstruct the lives of the victims, forcing them to internally revisit the situations that gave rise to them. That is why among the successes of black phone 2 is the aesthetic device designed to dramatize dreams of Gwen, creating genuinely dreamlike atmospheres. Although some of this was already present in the original, here the resource obtains a more exhaustive development, opening up a whole subtrama that brings new elements to the combo.

Or not so new. Because that whole line of the story owes a lot to the saga Nightmareespecially the original film, a milestone in the horror master’s filmography Wes Craven, released in 1984. Another success is the judicious use of iconic Pink Floyd songs within the soundtrack: if in the first one it was “On the Run”, an electronic interlude of The dark side of the Moonhere it is “Another Brick in the Wall” that contributes its gloomy spirit to a key moment in the story. But when you reach the final stretch black phone 2 He has already exhausted his best ideas, as if he suddenly became aware of his B movie identity, but you will misunderstand what that means. Then he bets on excess and loses, a typical case in which less would have been more.