98 min | R | August 13, 2021 | Screen Gems
The Blind Man from the first film is back, this time raising a kidnapped girl in his fortified house. Then a crew of armed men show up to take her. The movie wants you to root for a serial killer because the new bad guys are worse.
Norman Nordstrom lives alone in a rebuilt house with a young girl named Phoenix. He raises her in isolation and trains her to survive. A crew of men arrives to take her, and the violence begins. The first film asked you to fear this man as he hunted three people who broke into his home. The sequel asks you to cheer for him as he protects a child. Rodo Sayagues and Fede Álvarez build the whole movie on that inversion, and the inversion does not hold weight.
Stephen Lang plays Norman with total physical commitment. He moves through dark rooms by sound and touch, and Lang sells the choreography of a blind man who has mapped every inch of his territory. His face stays still while his hands do the work. Madelyn Grace plays Phoenix as a child who knows nothing of the outside world and wants to escape it. She holds her own in scenes built around fear. Brendan Sexton III plays Raylan as the leader of the intruding crew, and he commits to menace without ever becoming a person. The script gives Lang a backstory designed to soften a monster, and no amount of acting can launder it.
Sayagues directs from a script he wrote with Álvarez, who directed the first film. The house remains the engine of the franchise, and the production design turns its corridors and basements into a trap that works in both directions. The camera tracks Norman through the dark and uses sound to mark where danger sits. Sayagues stages the set pieces with clarity, and the geography of each fight stays legible even in low light. The problem is not the filmmaking. The problem is that the camera keeps asking you to admire a man the first film built you to fear.
The film functions as a brutal home-invasion thriller and nothing more. It piles on violence to distract from the moral hole at its center. Norman is a predator, and dressing him as a reluctant guardian does not change what he is. Sayagues and Álvarez want to have it both ways, and the audience pays for that choice. There is craft here and a genuinely committed lead. There is no reason to want this man to win.