SMILE 2 - Mark Reviews Movies

Smile 2, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 18, 2024

Writer/director Parker Finn takes a pretty silly idea less seriously in Smile 2, the filmmaker's second feature. Yes, this sequel is technically more of the same, but tonally, it feels like a near-complete reversal. Smile became bogged down by, not only its reliance on cheap jump-scares, but also the baggage of attempting to directly confront the concept of trauma in material that barely seemed interested in it—apart from adding some severity to those scares.

With his follow-up, Finn is clearly having more fun by simply embracing the material on a base level. If it's just supposed to be a machine for generating scares, that's exactly what it'll do. If the inherent idea of a smiling demon-like creature that feeds on the turmoil of the mind of its host is kind of ridiculous, this film will make a game of the conceit, playing it quite effectively and possibly up until its very final minutes. It's a bloody, goofy, and skillfully crafted ride of a horror story.

Finn begins by putting everything from the last movie to rest, in a one-take prologue that follows Kyle Gallner's Joel. Those here for this entry will recall him as the cop who witnessed his ex-girlfriend endure and ultimately succumb to the otherworldly threat that messes with people's minds by making them see things and people that aren't there. By the end of the introductory sequence, the filmmaker puts the finishing touches on the dangling threads of the previous tale, and the sudden, gory conclusion of it could be seen as Finn also putting an end to everything else about the predecessor, too.

That's because this new installment, featuring a different cast of characters and set of thematic concerns and world in which to play, does feel very distinct once it properly begins. We meet Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a famous singer who took a year off following a tragic car accident that left her severely injured and killed her actor boyfriend.

Having physically recuperated, it's time for Skye's grand comeback tour, but the pressures of having to perform elaborate choreography and of not wanting to fail are getting to her. She knows a guy who can help her get some prescription pain medicine, because he was the same guy who helped her get all of the recreational drugs that eventually resulted in the fatal car wreck.

Oh, Lewis (Lukas Gage), that guy, also happens to be the guy who witnessed Joel's end during the introduction, and the rules being the rules of that smiling demon-thing, that means Lewis has spent the last week or so losing his mind to terrifying visions. Skye shows up at his apartment just in time to witness Lewis' end, using a barbell weight on his own face until there's nothing recognizably face-like remaining. It's excessive, to say the least, but that becomes the whole point.

The excess here isn't simply in the gore, though, which is smartly used to punctuate assorted suspense scenes or to shock us into submitting to its twisted game, in which nothing might be what it seems. No, it's also in the world of the music business that Skye inhabits, as everybody wants the singer to be the successful comeback story, to be calm and collected around adoring fans (whose big smiles in her presence make us think twice about whether or not they're part of the demon's scheme), and to have it all together, even though she's still tormented by her addictions and the guilt of surviving that car crash.

Nobody seems to want all of that more than Skye's manager (played by Rosemarie DeWitt), who is also the singer's mother and doesn't want to hear about her daughter's deteriorating mental state. The notion of a guilt-ridden singer, overcome and overwhelmed by the demands of fame and people counting on her, makes a lot more sense than the first movie's psychiatrist protagonist, especially since that character just added to the feeling that Finn wanted to say something of emotional weight about trauma—even if the material simply couldn't support it.

This one's more playful as a result of the various shifts, becoming a subtle satire of celebrity and the entertainment industry in the process. If we didn't already know that there's a supernatural force at work here, we might be fooled into thinking all of this is genuinely in Skye's burdened mind, which starts to imagine that the dead boyfriend (played by Ray Nicholson) is haunting her. That happens at a fancy fundraiser, where Skye reveals a bit too much about her struggles with fame to a crowd that didn't pay for such honesty.

There's another clever scene of hallucination in which Skye envisions her backup dancers doing a twisted routine in an effort to drive her mad. As more and more is revealed about the singer's past (including the specifics of the accident and her broken friendship with Dylan Gelula's Gemma), it turns out she has plenty of reason to be haunted, regardless of the existence of the smiling demon.

Scott's performance, by the way, is a real highwire act of making this character believable on her own terms, while also rising to match those over-the-top moments of satirical and gore-filled humor. It's tricky stuff, because one wrong step in either direction could ruin the horror, the comedy, the understanding of this character, or all of these elements, but somehow, Scott gets all of it right.

The whole film finds a sly balance, too, because it's genuinely scary at times (One jump-scare in particular is a deft piece of misdirection) and often wickedly funny. Even the reality-bending trickery of Smile 2 serves a purpose, if only for a final punch line so devilish that Finn might as well call it quits now with the material—or start thinking nonstop of a way to even attempt to top it.

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