The sequel no-one asked for, but it’s actually pretty good.

There’s some spoilers ahead, but I’ll warn you.

The first movie was very brutal. The kids were facing abuse from their father at home and the bullying at school was horrific (with Finn, the main character, being a victim). The serial killer was basically just a natural extension of the violence inherent to this society. This was also the late 70s, so serial killers were everywhere in the US (although the true peak was in the mid-80s). This movie is similarly brutal, but at the same time, the brutality is different.

It’s been four years after Finn was captured and his sister, Gwen, helped in finding him based on her dreams. Finn still hears black phones he encounters ringing (and he answers them telling the caller that he can’t help them) and Gwen has been dreaming again. Except, this time she dreams of previously unknown victims who try to leave her a message by scratching a message on ice, under which they are trapped. One night, she sleepwalks to the basement where Finn was kept. There she answers the phone to have a conversation with their mother, who died seven years previous. The siblings decide to investigate their mother’s time as a counselor at a Christian camp, which is snowed in due to a huge storm.

Of course, the big question would be that how do you continue from what happened in the first movie? In that first movie, the supernatural element was on the side of good. Gwen had her dreams that helped her figure out who the killer was, and the nominal black phone was a source of help and advice for Finn. Now, things are a bit different. The Grabber is back, but he died, so it can’t be natural. Do they do it in a satisfactory way? Yes. But there’s other differences here which I’ll get to in the spoiler part.

The way the first movie depicted dreams continues here. They have a look of old home movies. Not quite as rough, but you get the point. This does also mean that you always know when you are in a dream and it comes into play quite a bit.

They use the mask the Grabber wore nicely. It is an iconic piece of design. It’s not as flexible as it was in the first movie, where Grabber would switch parts of it more often, but if the audience remembers a specific countenance, why not go with that?

All in all, it’s a fine movie, but I do feel it lost something from the first one. I do wonder whether they try to continue this, as it seems that the movie will be a decent success based on the first day box office in the US and that there was quite a few people in the theater I saw it in.

So, spoiler territory:

The first movie was bleak and hopeless. The two kids were basically on their own, as the adults were pretty useless or even antagonistic, as is the case with their father. It was all inescapable. Even though Finn got out from Grabber’s clutches safely, he and Gwen still needed to live with their alcoholic and abusive father. The bullying at the school was not going to stop, except that, as we see in this film, Finn is now the perpetrator.

This is not the case in this movie. This is more hopeful and the (small) community they are stuck in comes together to join their fight. I don’t know if I like this. The first movie had a very specific feel, this one goes more mainstream in it’s happier ending. Gwen finds a boyfriend, their dad helps out and no-one dies.

This movie doesn’t completely lose the brutality though, but here’s the thing: The kids are allowed to be as brutal as they can. Usually, in movies like this, that get bloody, the survivors might be allowed to get violent, but it’s in a way that still let’s them off the hook. They are depicted as having being forced into their actions. In this movie, the kids seem very willing participants in it. They don’t want to have to kill anyone, but when they are pushed, they go all in. Gwen actually hacks Grabber’s leg off with an ax while Finn is bashing his face onto ice repeatedly. The camera doesn’t shy away from this either.

Are they trying to tell us something with this? Is the cycle of violence just going to continue in some other way?