Smile 2

A short film concept – forced and unsetting smiles as the harbinger of possessed doom – adapted into a full-length feature film and became a surprise hit back in 2022. SMILE – using an incredible low-budget viral marketing campaign to draw in audiences – terrified cinemas into a lucrative box office taking and created a brand new shining gem in the horror firmament. Fast forward two years later, and director Parker Finn returns with a sequel that is bigger, bolder, and scarier, solidifying Finn’s status as a horror master as well as the SMILE franchise’s place as the stuff of nightmares.

Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is about to go on a massive world tour – or, rather, attempt to go on a massive world tour once again. Skye is in recovery from not only substance and alcohol abuse issues but in physical therapy from a horrific car accident that has left her scarred and permanently injured, as well as dealing with the trauma of losing her actor boyfriend Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson). Skye’s mother and manager, Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), keeps Skye under a tight and controlled schedule as much as she can while trying to allow Skye space and autonomy – but with a global relaunch, record label investment and a very rare second chance at success, it is imperative that Skye be clean, sober, and focused. Injury flare-ups during dance rehearsals push Skye to clandestinely meet with old high school friend turned drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) for a stash of Vicodin. But Lukas has witnessed a horrific murder…and with a sinister grin, Lewis ends his own life and passes the smiling affliction onto Skye. With the mounting pressures of a global press launch for the tour, her dark past, and expanding loneliness, Skye begins to see the terrifying toothy grin everywhere she looks. But someone knows that Skye saw Lewis’ death…and is trying to reach Skye on her phone. Is there a way to break the smiling possession? Who is the person on the other end of the phone? Can Skye survive the gnawing terror of that smile?

First and foremost, it is rare for a sequel film to surpass the original film; often sequels attempt to squeeze every ounce of the original formula on a bigger scale (and a bigger budget) while essentially not deviating from the major elements of the original film. Returning cast as static characters, tropes and cliches and same story beats transposed to new and bigger locations… sequels so often feel like ‘do the same thing again, just more’.

SMILE 2 certainly does go bigger and cover the same haunting structure that the first film did, but as with the first film, Finn centers the events of the film around a complex and fully-developed protagonist that anchors everything else around it; SMILE 2 gives us Skye Riley – famous, talented, and functioning on a much larger scale as a ‘person’ in the world of SMILE than Sosie Bacon’s therapist Rose Cotter. But both characters are deeply nuanced and complex, which is an alchemic balance of Finn’s writing and the actress in the role in each film. SMILE 2’s Skye harbors such guilt over the accidental death of Paul, her ruinous career status, and her own self loathing in the face of old dreams of success and fame that her struggle to reconcile her sanity and sobriety over the possibility of something otherworldly being involved in her instability is engaging on its own; Scott’s performance lifts the complexity on the page and makes Skye raw, exposed, erratic and fragile while looking for every morsel of strength she owns to try and overcome the terror attached to her and become a better person. Scott’s performance is not only the highlight of the film, but Scott herself finally arrives as an actress. Scott has always been on the verge of prominence as a performer, had it not been for projects that obscure her talents, or that simply squander them: Power Rangers was a let down for her Pink Ranger; Charlie’s Angels (2019) reduced her to the ‘newbie’ without much agency; and the less said about the shameful handling of her Princess Jasmin in the live-action mess that was the remake of Aladdin (2019) the better.  Charismatic and attractive, it has always been noted that Scott could sing and dance, handle physical roles, and display emotion, but the projects leading up to now have always placed her second or simply never worked with the film makers leading the project. Here, Scott dives deep into paranoia, rage, grief, and guilt, speaking with her eyes as much as her physicality. She pulls hair from her head, smacks her face and leaves marks in psychotic breaks, panic cries (snot included) and suffers some gruesome injuries throughout SMILE 2.