When Smile, an original low-budget horror movie, became a surprise smash hit in 2022, it was a success story that was easier to admire than it was a film to rally behind. Originally intended for a streaming premiere, the $17m movie was elevated to a theatrical release after enthused test screenings, going on to make $217m worldwide, a huge win for Paramount and the genre at large. It was a slick, stylishly made attempt to update a familiar supernatural curse formula with the modern addition of a trauma narrative, a parasitic demon acting as a metaphor for the horror of inherited mental illness.
The film’s creator, Parker Finn, showed flair as a director but flaws as a writer, unable to push his tonally awkward film far enough out of the shadow of both The Ring and It Follows and struggling with subtext that required a little more subtlety to cut as deep as his more effectively visceral use of gore. A sequel was inevitable but also hard to imagine how it could be in any way justifiable, trotting out the same hellish endurance test for another unlucky victim.
But in Smile 2, Finn has found a nifty way to repurpose his setup by shifting from a psychiatrist, haunted by her involvement in the death of her abusive mother, to a pop star, also haunted by the death of her actor boyfriend, and her addiction to both drugs and alcohol that may have played a part. The curse remains the same – someone kills themself in front of you while smiling and then you’re it, plagued for six days with visions of creepily grinning people in your life until you then end your life as well. The previous film had ended with the protagonist’s suicide in front of her love interest, who returns for a smart cold open that ties the two films together.
It’s passed on to low-level drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), who is contacted one night by a desperate Skye Riley (the British actor Naomi Scott), a fallen pop singer about to embark on a brash comeback tour still crippled by both physical and emotional pain from a car accident a year earlier. She’s otherwise sober but has been relying on Vicodin and is in need of a refill. But when she arrives at Lewis’s place, it’s clear that something isn’t right and what she initially puts down to an overindulgence in cocaine, she then sees as something else as Lewis brutally kills himself in front of her. Aware of the damage her involvement would do to her career, Skye flees the scene but she’s soon haunted by something far worse than guilt …
It’s a boon time for both films centered on pop stars (the film joins Trap and The Idea of You this year with 2025 giving us Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary) and horrors focused on the hell of being a famous woman (it comes just after The Substance). I’m not sure if Smile 2 really adds much to an experience that we don’t already know (fame = lonely, fans = obnoxious, momagers = annoying) but it does make for a neat, well-utilised setting for a horror film about losing one’s mind. The decadent disintegration of a celebrity recalls late 70s and 80s genre fare like The Eyes of Laura Mars and The Fan. The pressures and expectations of being in the public eye help to amplify anxiety as Skye tries to maintain a sunny, camera-ready persona while plagued by grotesque visions. The world of celebrity within the film is also one that feels mostly believable – the music is convincingly radio-friendly, Skye’s shifting identity as a pop star tracks visually, Drew Barrymore plays Drew Barrymore in a talkshow scene – even if they couldn’t get Madison Square Garden to play ball (Skye’s big concert is at, coughs, Herald Square Garden). Finn is also bizarrely obsessed with the power of a Voss water bottle, which goes beyond product placement into baffling, key plot component territory (a brief look at the company’s Instagram stories suggests some sort of undefined partnership).
The forced full-teeth smiles, cleverly used once again in a wide-reaching promotional campaign, still remain strangely unscary to me, but the violence is joltingly repulsive. (We appear to be entering the mainstream gruesomeness of late 2000s torture porn with this, the successful return of the Saw films and the birth of the Terrifier franchise.) Like the first film, there’s still a slight unease between grimness and goofiness and while nothing here rivals the absurdly cartoonish awfulness of the heroine’s uncaring boyfriend in Smile, it doesn’t always work for Finn to be Saying Something about trauma, suicide and addiction in the muted style of a Serious Movie when something far sillier is about to come in the next scene. Scott is a fantastically committed goes-to-hell-and-back Scream Queen but even she struggles with the shrieking, weapon-wielding pantomime of the last act.
Finn also cheats a few too many times by relying on what feel like expanded, bordering on endless, powers of the demon, rug-pulling to such an extent that it feels as if we’re watching one long dream sequence (the film is an unforgivably over-extended 127 minutes long) and despite such narrative trickery, he can’t distract us from what’s essentially the same long hopeless march as the first film. As stylishly made as these films might be, there’s still not enough of a distinctive identity away from its inspirations and not enough away from the (very loud) sound and fury to give us hope that this is a story worth retelling time and time again. There’s an appealingly deranged, if utterly inevitable, final scene that will also inevitably lead to more, but the smile is already starting to fade.
Smile 2 is out in US, UK and Australian cinemas on 18 October
