Warning: This post contains spoilers for Smile 2.
What’s worse, being infected by a sadistic demonic entity that feeds off its victims’ trauma or the crushing loneliness of superstardom?
In Smile 2, now in theaters, Naomi Scott delivers a star-making performance as Skye Riley, a global pop sensation about to embark on a new world tour who finds herself in the hellish throes of both these phenomena over the course of one unending nightmare of a week. Thanks to M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, it’s not the first horror movie of the year to dip its toe into the discourse surrounding society’s obsession with pop prodigies, but it’s arguably the more poignant effort.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The horror sequel, from franchise writer-director Parker Finn, arrives two years after its predecessor, Smile, became a buzzy genre breakout, earning over $217 million worldwide to become one of the biggest theatrical successes of 2022. The first film centers on Sosie Bacon’s Dr. Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist who begins experiencing increasingly terrifying visions after witnessing one of her patients violently commit suicide while eerily smiling at her. Naturally, it turns out she’s inherited a supernatural curse embodied by a shape-shifting parasitic spirit that subjects its targets to extreme psychological torment for seven days before fully possessing them and forcing them to kill themselves in front of another person so it can latch onto a new host. It’s a premise that’s clearly cut from the same chain-possession cloth as iconic horror entries like The Ring and It Follows—but tweaks the formula to heavily feature maniacal grins.
This time around, the demon sets itself up to inflict suffering on a far greater scale by infecting Skye, one of the world’s most famous music acts. And boy does she have a lot of trauma for it to feast on. A year earlier, Skye’s former hard-partying ways culminated in a gruesome car accident that killed her actor boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson, the son of master scary smiler Jack Nicholson), and left her with a shattered leg and debilitating back injury. The crash was Skye’s rock bottom, forcing her to get sober and attempt to cope with her all-consuming grief and guilt. Now, she deals with her drug and alcohol cravings by chugging glass bottles of Voss water (an over-the-top product placement bit that somehow turns into an actual plot point) and trying not to rip out the hair that’s already much shorter thanks to a despair-stricken chop necessitated by the Trichotillomania she’s apparently developed since the accident.
When the movie begins, Skye is on the verge of a career comeback. But it’s clear that, both physically and mentally, she’s still in anguish. Kept by doctors from obtaining a painkiller prescription due to her history of substance abuse, Skye turns to a low-level drug dealer she knew in high school, Lewis (Lukas Gage), to get the Vicodin she needs to ease her back pain enough to perform at her best.
Unfortunately, Lewis just so happened to recently find himself at the scene of a murder involving none other than Rose’s policeman ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), the person who witnessed Rose’s self-immolation in the final minutes of the first movie and damned himself in the process. The opening scene of Smile 2 shows Joel attempting to make use of the curse’s only known loophole by killing the lackey of a drug kingpin in front of him in an attempt to transfer the curse to someone Joel believes deserves such a fate. Instead, a shootout ensues and both drug dealers end up dead, leaving Lewis—whom Joel didn’t know was there—as the only living witness and heir to the curse. Joel makes a run for it but is promptly splattered onto the street by an oncoming car in an uber-gory sequence that sets the tone for the next two-plus hours of the film’s runtime.
In a rare feat for a horror sequel, Smile 2 improves on the conceit of the original by making the stakes bigger, more entertaining, and many times more torturous to watch play out to their inevitable end.
Even before she contracts the curse from Lewis, Skye is already in an impossible situation. Facing intense pressure to succeed from her label, manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), and legions of fans, any sign of weakness or unreliability is treated as evidence that she’s falling back down the rabbit hole of addiction and mental instability. At the height of her substance-fueled bad behavior, she estranged herself from her childhood best friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula), the only person with whom she was able to be truly vulnerable, and now has no one to confide in about her increasingly volatile headspace.
It’s lonely at the top, as they say, and by connecting the influence of the franchise’s devilishly grinning demon to the malevolent effects of reaching a certain level of fame, Skye’s descent into hell becomes an apt metaphor for our culture’s propensity for chewing up and spitting out rising young stars, particularly female ones.
“I love the world of pop. I’m fascinated by some of these women—these personas out there, who the real person is behind that velvet robe,” Finn told the Hollywood Reporter of the inspiration for Smile 2. “And once I sort of stumbled on this idea of this mega pop star in Skye Riley, I just got kind of electrified by it and got obsessed with it.”
Smile 2 can’t quite deliver on the promise of its premise, ultimately relying on the same trick of the original—that much of what we see Skye experience as she hurtles toward the end of the curse’s weeklong expiration date is actually all in her head. But, as any horror aficionado likely predicted would happen from the start, when Skye finds herself on stage in front of a packed stadium of screaming fans at the exact moment time runs out for her to keep the demon at bay, it’s still a fittingly horrific final twist.
Skye’s suicide is pretty much the only instance of gore in the entire movie from which the camera pans away. Instead, we get front row seats to her fans’ panicked reactions with the knowledge that they’re now all next in line to suffer the consequences of the smiling possession. How that superspreader event will factor into the future of the franchise is up in the air, according to Finn.
“There’s so many exciting roads that Smile could go down,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “We’ll have to see how audiences react to Smile 2, but I think that’s what’s great about Smile is there’s an opportunity to tell all different kinds of diverse stories and sort of place ourselves in different worlds that Smile then comes in and invades.”
Still, it may make you think twice about whether it’s all worth it the next time you’re spending hours waiting in a Ticketmaster queue.
