Director: Parker Finn
Stars: Naomi Scott, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Rosemarie DeWitt
I was particularly pro-Smile back in 2022 when Parker Finn’s first movie stormed into multiplexes after COVID had theatres opening and closing their doors at a stutter over the two years prior. I, like many others, was more than ready for a populist horror rollercoaster ride. The next Malignant, in fact. And Smile delivered. Finn played by the mainstream rulebook, peppering his piece with the expected jump scares, but it was the way they were orchestrated that impressed, with a confidence and ruthlessness that conjured respect.
Audiences turned out for it, and $200 mil later, Finn had a confirmed hit on his hands. Two years later and here’s the inevitable sequel… even if the first movie didn’t entirely cry out to become a series.
We pick up 6 days later, and surviving cop Joel (Kyle Gallner) is at his wit’s end, running out of time as the supernatural monster latched on to him closes in for the kill. Finn orchestrates a tightly controlled opening which brings Joel into unintended contact with young drug dealer Lewis (Luke Gage). A bloody punchline transitions us elsewhere, however, to certified pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) as she prepares for her comeback tour following a near fatal car accident and a very public battle with drug addiction.
Under pressure to fulfil a promise to her adoring fans, as well as her manager/mother Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), Skye can’t afford the toll of pain from her still-healing scars. Thus she contacts shady high school acquaintance Lewis to score some Vicodin. It is through this interaction that Skye finds herself smiled upon by the series’ ‘cosmic’ menace.
The problem with mounting a sequel with, ostensibly, no surviving players, is that you have to induct everything all over again, albeit in a new context. Granted, Smile 2 trumps its predecessor in terms of character and setting. Scott puts her all into selling Skye as a bone fide pop performer, and the minutiae of her entourage and tour prep feel lived-in and real. As real as her grit and frustration. Finn spends a lot of time setting the scene (his sequel moves more slowly than his original), but it is an eminently interesting world to spend time in. It engages with the warped perspectives and loneliness of the self-immolating celebrity, and actively includes our craven obsession with such figures, collectively chasing the pretty and successful to their painful downward spirals.
With no clue what’s happening to her, Skye’s experience of the various mind games put upon her by the smile monster encourages a sense of déjà vu. Remixes of the torments endured last time by Sosie Bacon’s Rose. Grinning ghosts popping out of nowhere, loved-ones morphed into gurning threats and – as a set-piece – a mid-film meltdown in a crushingly public setting. Skye’s party is just a little more high profile. Smile 2 seems loathe to really develop the lore surrounding its mysterious menace. That helps the threat to retain its scariness (the unexplained has its own particular power), but it’s hard not to see Smile 2 as simply a pop cover version, with little new to offer. Exposition has to ultimately fall to a conveniently knowledgeable third party, otherwise we’d never get anywhere.
Finn does flex his prowess behind the camera, mounting more technically complex and accomplished sequences, spending time on niftier, flashier scene transitions and the like. It’s a slickness that matches the dazzling mechanical motions of a stadium-scaled pop concert. He’s just as gusto with the blood and guts (this is a gleefully violent series). And the film is never as effectively scary as a bravura sequence which repurposes Skye’s backing dancers as an en masse onslaught in Skye’s gorgeous New York apartment.
But the star of the show is Scott. Finn brought a sustained pitch of hysteria out of Sosie Bacon last time around and he draws something arguably more layered and engaging out of Scott. One senses that she has put a lot into this character, both physically and emotionally. It’s among the most committed and commanding horror performances of the year, and it sails Smile 2 through its doldrum sense of over-familiarity.
Smile took the subtlety out of the popular horror trope of the trauma narrative (thrillingly so), making it a towering monster too powerful to overcome. Skye’s deal is slightly more intricate, laced with a grubbier mix of guilt and self-hatred, but the roots remain similar – being haunted by a past you cannot change. The past isn’t something anyone can kill. The best we can do is find new ways to reconcile and live with it. Smile 2 offers no new revelations on how this can be done (especially the latter part). And while the ending tees up a necessarily more ambitious third film inevitably to come, the journey to get there takes us on a precariously balanced and increasingly silly runaround, one that’s distractingly overstuffed with VOSS product placement.
The Lost Highway Hotel 