Every horror movie franchise operates according to its own set of rules, so in the spirit of public service, we’ll offer a refresher on the parameters of filmmaker Parker Finn’s 2022 directorial debut Smile. There’s a supernatural parasite who feeds on trauma and attaches itself to an unwilling host. Side effects may include: paranoia, insanity, hallucinations involving friends and loved ones beaming ear to ear like they’re auditioning for a biopic on the Joker, suicidal ideation, and actual suicide. After six or seven days, the unlucky recipient of such unsolicited paranormal activities must get someone to witness their own demise and thus, pass the curse on. It’s essentially an evil chain letter crossed with a tapeworm, if the tapeworm could make itself 20 feet tall, resemble your mom and enter your body by pulling apart your jaws. Cool!
A feature-length extension of ideas that Finn toyed with in his short Laura Hasn’t Slept (2020), Smile played its rictus-grin ace in the hole repeatedly and became a surprise hit. Paramount, sensing a possible new horror franchise in the making, quickly greenlit a sequel. The movie may not have had an instantly recognizable villain — no one would mistake the spindly, toothy entity messing with people’s minds for the second coming of Chuckie, Freddy or Jason — but like the iconic hockey mask and razor-fingered gloves of yesteryear, that maniacal facial expression served as a shorthand for serial kills, thrills and chills. The question wasn’t whether Finn and friends would start pumping out more entries so much as how quickly this conceit might get beaten into the ground.
The answer is: thankfully not that quickly. Smile 2 kicks off more or less where the first movie ends, focusing on the original’s final guy, Joel (Kyle Gallner), six days after witnessing his possessed friend’s death. He’s still haunted by visions of her flaming body, in fact, as he makes his way up to a drug-stash house tucked away in some rural corner upstate. The gent knows he’s doomed, but figures that if he passes this on to some scumbags truly deserving of this fate, he’ll balance the scales of karma a tad. Things go wrong, and amidst the melee that occurs, a middleman dealer (Lukas Gage) becomes the next victim on deck. Just for kicks, Finn stages a gruesome death scene involving a truck, a body and blood smear that, as the camera pulls up and back, resembles… well, see title.
So far, so very Smile-y. Soon, we meet our new hero: Skye Riley (Aladdin‘s Naomi Scott). She’s a megafamous pop singer who was involved in a car accident that left her scarred and took the life of her movie-star boyfriend (Ray Nicholson, whose dad had been known to flash a malicious grin from time to time). Now, after a year of rest, recuperation and rehab stints, Riley is ready for her redemption tour. She’s in full publicity mode, practicing routines with dancers and giving the press sound bites and appearing on The Drew Barrymore Show — big up to Barrymore for appearing as herself — to tearfully declare the beginning of the Newly Sober Riley 2.0 era. Her mom (Rosemary DeWitt), her omnipresent assistant (Miles Gutierrrez-Riley) and the money guy (Raúl Castillo) bankrolling her comeback are counting on her staying clean and showing up on time. The pressure to perform plus residual physical ailments means illicit painkillers are a necessity, however. So she stops by her dealer’s apartment for Vicodin. Unfortunately, he happened to have seen a guy take his own life some six days prior., and now believes that something is driving him crazy…
And here’s where things get either very interesting for culturati types or very whateversville for folks who simply want jump scares and cool kills. Smile 2 definitely has its share of the latter, peaking when the series’ big bad forces a host to bash his skull in with a weightlifting plate. The result is not, er, pretty. Now that Riley has started seeing everyone from fans to her dead former boyfriend sporting that telltale head-down/mouth-corners-up look — and Scott proves that she’s as adept at freakouts as she as is at hitting high notes — it’s only a matter of time before the truly gnarly shit goes down. Meanwhile, Finn is throwing every stylistic trick in his repertoire at the screen, from surveillance-cam-style horizontal pans to disarmingly upside-down compositions. The droning dreadcore score by composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer sounds like the opening music to The Shining soaked in codeine. The per capita rate of creepy smiles here is off the freakin’ charts.
Yet by setting this continuation of the Smileverse in the world of modern pop megastardom, Finn seems to be doing more than just adding an extra sheen of sequins and staged dance numbers into the mix here. Skye Riley can easily be read as a composite of Camila Cabello, Charli XCX, Dua Lipa and every third female pop singer to grace the charts over the past decade. And whether its embedding bone-chilling, teeth-baring looks or not into its spooky sequences, Smile 2 spends a lot of time mining horror out of the old-fashioned music-industry apparatus. Riley’s mom is her own terror. Hangers-on and tour producers are killing her softly with faux-kindness and little real concern for her stability. The press corps are only a step up from corpse robbers. Fans cross boundaries with stunning regularity. (At least Skye is not kidnapped by Josh Hartnett.) There are long stretches where you actually forget you’re watching a Smile movie and couldn’t be blamed for thinking you’ve stumbled into a slightly more nightmarish version of Beyond the Lights.
When these two elements intertwine, as with Riley’s truly unsettling encounter with her dancers in her apartment or a climax involving a concert, you can see why the decision to place this franchise entry in this particular landscape seems ripe for scares. But what this sequel really seems to be suggesting is that there is nothing scarier than an unstable pop star in 2024, poised on the edge of a public meltdown captured by a million cellphones and consumed by scandal-hungry social-media addicts. When it comes to possessing your soul, a supernatural demon can’t hold a candle to show business. Smile 2 may not be every horror fanatic’s cup of tea. Chappell Roan, however, will fucking love this movie.
From Rolling Stone US
