The law of the sequel demands more, and Smile 2 obeys with feverish verve. Louder screams, nastier villains, gnarlier arterial sprays, bigger rictus grins—Parker Finn’s maximalist follow-up to his 2022 horror hit exhibits no interest in half-measures. Its opening set piece concludes with a car crash, a mutilated body, and a trail of blood that stretches the length of the Hudson. From there, things only grow more extreme.
If this description makes Smile 2 sound like a creature of demented excess, well, yes and no. In one sense the movie is wild and manic, delivering countless freak-outs and supplying stomach-churning levels of gore. Yet it is also the product of careful and estimable craft, confirming Finn’s talent for fluid camerawork and creepy imagery. (The returning cinematographer is Charlie Sarroff.) That cold open may be a hectic and hyper-violent sequence of murder and mayhem, but it’s captured in a silky take that draws you in and heightens the desperation, infusing the chaos with clarity as well as intensity.
The victim at the center of Finn’s devilish chicanery is Skye Riley (Naomi Scott, excellent), a drug-addled pop star whose glam-punk anthems are intended to evoked Lady Gaga in her “Bad Romance” era. Still haunted by a year-old traffic accident that resulted in the death of her boyfriend (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack), Skye is about to embark on a rehabilitation tour designed to both tout her newfound sobriety and reassure her legion of adoring fans. A brief appearance on the Drew Barrymore Show suggests she’s in decent shape, but she’s still suffering from a severe back injury, requiring clandestine trips to her local Vicodin dealer, Lewis (a funny Lukas Gage). The bizarre behavior she witnesses from him—first he’s frenzied (“I am having the worst week”), then he suddenly calms himself and smirks eerily before bashing his face in with a large metal weight—induces a chain of ghoulish, phantasmagorical events, a pain no opiate could possibly ease.
From here, you know pretty much what to expect, assuming you’ve seen Smile. It isn’t fair to say that Finn rotely copies himself—at least thematically, this sequel explores some new ideas—but from a horror perspective, he hasn’t much fudged his original conceit. Over the ensuing week, Skye is regularly tormented by inexplicable visions and menacing phenomena, many of which take the form of people sporting decidedly creepy leers. Most of these are revealed to be hallucinations (or are they??), though the distinction between what’s happening in Skye’s mind versus real life grows increasingly blurry. What is clear is that the clock is ticking: If she doesn’t somehow extricate herself from this killing curse, she’s sure to endure the same bloody fate as Lewis and his similarly suicidal forebears.
Conceptually, Smile 2 offers Finn unmitigated freedom to terrorize both his characters and his audience—a liberty he indulges all too gleefully. Every horror director is in some ways a practicing sadist—what is the point of making a scary movie if not to subject viewers to anguish, to terror?—and the Smile pictures implement this strategy in a way that’s both inventive and kind of obnoxious. The problem with illustrating the warping of the human mind on screen is that there are no rules, no visual method to comprehend the madness. That’s arguably the point—if Skye can’t tell what’s real, why should we?—but over time it produces a deadening effect, relentlessly priming us for the next obligatory fake-out. There is something shameless about how Finn loads the film with dream scenes and false visions and phony specters, as though he’s constantly cashing counterfeit checks. Knowing that we’re frozen in our seats, he gets to cry wolf over and over.
Such drudging repetition would seem to consign Smile 2 to the dustbin of cheap hackwork. And yet, even if Finn’s general approach is facile, his specific execution is often quite arresting. He enjoys tilting his camera upside-down, reflecting his heroine’s upturned mental state and accentuating the city’s jagged skyline. (The action here has migrated from the suburbs of New Jersey to the Big Apple.) He also depicts Skye’s fraying mind with impressive variety and ingenuity, whether it’s manipulating the text of a teleprompter at a charity event or harassing her in her apartment with a troupe of smiling backup dancers moving in ghastly rhythm, like some demonic ballet. A key flashback unfolds via another showy oner, the camera pivoting back and forth between its two snarling combatants as Finn delays the inevitable jolt for an indecent interval. And perhaps because the movie’s volume is cranked up to 11 from the start, it doesn’t fall victim to the usual overheated climax; instead, the finale serves up some memorable images that are gorily beautiful.
Essentially, Smile 2 comprises a handful of strong scenes that combine into a fairly banal whole—or they would, were it not for Scott’s unifying lead performance. Skye is a more assertive character than Sosie Bacon’s stricken shrink from the original, and Finn has wisely updated his tedious “It feeds on trauma!” shtick into a more intriguing thesis on the toxicity of celebrity. The notion that fans can be parasites leeching blood from their glamorous hosts isn’t novel, but it’s given unholy life during an autograph signing when Skye is besieged by grinning supporters of varying stripes (including that most disturbing of creatures, a preteen girl). The screenplay isn’t so reductive to posit that the real monster is fandom itself, but the dimension at least adds a shiver of intrigue to a movie that otherwise operates with sheer brute force.
And this is why Scott’s star turn is so crucial. As a scream queen, she’s perfectly credible and sympathetic, conveying fear and agony as her waking life disintegrates into a nightmare. But she also imbues Skye with a degree of agency that makes her more than just another helpless victim. Whether she’s chugging entire bottles of special-brand water or dancing vigorously with her ensemble in an array of glittering outfits (Scott, having previously established her mighty pipes in Aladdin, performed the songs herself), Skye is a dynamic presence, and Scott makes her not only perpetually scared but also a little bit scary. Smile 2 is broadly predictable, but what little suspense it generates derives from the possibility that Skye might actually possess the guile and the strength needed to defeat the invisible entity that takes such pleasure in torturing her.
Would that be her unnamed demon, or her director? Finn’s technique is merciless to the point of cruelty; he doesn’t play fair with Skye or with you. Yet he keeps you on edge, and his pummeling style also yields an ancillary layer of black comedy. When Skye informs a confederate (Dylan Gelula) that they need to fulfill a piece of exposition by travelling to Staten Island, her friend instinctively responds, “Ew, gross.” Shortly later, after being hoodwinked by her supernatural foe for the umpteenth time, Skye exclaims “I’m in control!” In moments like these, Smile 2 will have you grinning from ear to ear, even as it repeatedly goes straight for your throat.
Grade: B-
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.