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Debuting as the resurrected bestselling author machine was persistently generating adaptations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, similar to the poorest the author's tales, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the source was found inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the tale of the antagonist, a brutal murderer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and too focused on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an mindless scary movie material.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from the monster movie to their thriller to the adventure movie to the utter financial disappointment of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the continuation can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The initial movie finished with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This situation has required filmmaker Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while snowed in at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is tracking to defend her. The script is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a place that will also add to backstories for both main character and enemy, filling in details we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the director includes a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the devil and hell, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, including superfluous difficulties to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he possesses authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of another series. If another installment comes, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australian cinemas on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October