The Black Phone 2 would be a fantastic standalone movie, but its strange role in a preexisting franchise makes for an unsatisfying sequel.

The Black Phone told the story of Finney Blake (Mason Thames), a young boy who is kidnapped and held captive by a man known only to viewers as The Grabber (Ethan Hawke). The Black Phone 2 shows the return of The Grabber’s revenge-seeking spirit.

The movie does fairly well in terms of scare-factor and has a reasonably interesting plot; however, it does not completely make sense lined up with the original film.

The first movie was scary because it was realistic with a pretty tame amount of supernatural elements, a lot of which could even be explained away as the delusions of a boy trapped in strenuous circumstances. But the sequel presents a storyline completely based on expanding the previous supernatural elements to an unnecessary extent. 

In many scenarios, the increasing intricacy of the plot is a natural development as time progresses, but the complexity this sequel displays does not even compare to that of the first film. It creates contradictions with the seemingly established rules surrounding the extent of the powers the dead have. The Grabber receives a major power up post-mortem that no other dead character has. 

Aside from the supernatural elements, there are plenty of other plot points that seem out of place in the storyline, the primary one being Finney and his sister trying to find the identity of The Grabber. It doesn’t make sense that they are still trying to find out who the kidnapper is years later, given the way that the initial movie ended with his death, that they know the villain’s brother, and how the police originally had been on the scene to make sense of the case.

The Black Phone 2 is overall an unnecessary sequel that did not fit well with the initial film.