Smile 2 (2024) review

Dir. Parker Finn

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

When Smile opened to rave reviews and became an instant success (to the tune of over $200 million globally), a sequel was inevitable. Anyone who approached Smile 2 with trepidation couldn’t rightfully be blamed. Such a swiftly greenlit follow-up had all the repercussions of what Elvis Costello once clarified as the ill-fated process that leads most singers down the drain just as they’re finally experiencing success. You get 20 years to write your first album. You get six months to write your second.

Smile 2 is so good that writer/director Parker Finn has now earned himself the benefit of any and all doubt. He skillfully left bits and pieces of his feature directorial debut (an expansion of his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept) open-ended in case the opportunity to further the series presented itself. Smile 2 not only goes bigger, but it also expands upon its ideas of the “Smile Entity,” as its known, by mixing in elements of self-harm, self-loathing, and stress as compounding factors.

I neglected to rewatch Smile in lieu of its sequel. I fully remember how glum that film left me. At the time, I wrote “if you have personally experienced mental illness or are close with somebody who has, Smile is going to be a rough sit.” Watching the mental degradation of Sosie Bacon’s Rose Cotter was an anguishing experience. It was not a criticism, but a credit to Finn and the way he presented his concept of a metaphysical spirit infecting those by altering their perception of reality as a way to personify trauma and mental illness. Rose saw sinister, smiling individuals everywhere she went as she found herself under the spell for six days before it found a way to enter another person through a gobsmacking violence.

Smile was a thrilling work that showed Finn’s proclivity not only for storytelling, but for jump-scares. That being said, it’s still not a film I’ll be quick to revisit anytime soon.

Smile 2‘s victim is a pop superstar named Skye Riley (a terrific Naomi Scott), who also happens to be a recovering addict. She took a year off from her music career following a car accident that killer her actor boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson). Her already shaky reentry into an unbearably demanding and grueling global tour is compounded when she seeks out her previous dealer (Lukas Gage) for Vicodin and notices he’s not well. After acting erratic, he murders himself in a way that would make Cronenberg smile before transferring the Smile Entity to Skye.

Skye is none the wiser in the moment. Frankly, she’s more worried about the press discovering she was visiting her old drug dealer, circumstances be damned. However, that fateful encounter begins the degradation of her sanity. She begins hallucinating while taking demands from her manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), and even contacts her estranged best friend (Dylan Gelula, Shithouse) for help. As if keeping up with fast-paced choreography and costume changes wasn’t enough, she becomes a prisoner of her mind, unable to distinguish was is real and what is an aberration.

Smile 2 is the second horror film in the last three months with a pop star as its focal point. There’s something inherently ominous about the manufactured glitz and flawless sheen of contemporary music. M. Night Shyamalan somehow made a concert attended by thousands feel entrapping and claustrophobic in Trap. The world itself demands perfection from human beings whose music often shows they are flawed. That’s what Skye starts to realize even before she’s stuck with the curse of seeing smilers everywhere she goes. Finn does a wonderful job of disintegrating our grip on reality along with Skye’s, even if at certain points, it would’ve been nice to have more concretion.

For example, there’s a scene where a desperate Skye meets someone at a bar who claims he can help her with her problem. She arrives at the dive in a heavy coat to avoid being seen. Calls from her mother, choreographer, and agency hound her as she’s trying to get answers from a stranger. Then, bar patrons begin recognizing her en masse. What occurred to trigger all of this? The scene might be deft at putting Skye, and the viewer, in a pressure cooker of urgency, but I was waiting for a reveal of some kind. Did she inadvertently go “live” on a social media site? An explanation felt warranted, and Smile 2 sometimes bends reality to the point where it ostensibly revels in leaving us confused as to our sense of time and place.

And yet, there are scenes such as one where Skye is the keynote speaker at a banquet to help underprivileged kids. Early into her scripted speech, the teleprompter fails, forcing her to ad-lib. Predictably, this doesn’t go over well. Unpredictably, you don’t see how twisted Finn gets with the writing, staging, and execution of the sequence.

The third act is bound to leave you fully engaged, if breathless. Skye is committed, and then eventually has a confluence of events happen to her at such a pace that the final 30 minutes practically warrant a second viewing on their own. Finn is clearly enjoying himself on multiple levels: he worsens the tragedy of his protagonist, dials up the urgency, makes us question reality, sets up a riveting climax, and leaves us with a couple of ugly yet memorable images before sending us on our way. To no fault of Smile 2, admittedly, the final minutes play like a lesser version of The Substance. Had I not seen that film so recently, there’s a good chance I (and I suspect many others) would’ve been floored.

Smile 2 doesn’t feel like the work of someone only making their second feature. Parker Finn has such a firm grip on his story, concept, and ability to elicit effective jump-scares. The cynic in me worries that the ending of his impressive sequel inevitably set the stage for a subsequent installment that bites off more than it can chew (ala MaXXXine). I am willing to bet Finn himself would welcome these doubts. He’s probably been cooking something up for years that he’s about to unleash fearlessly into the world, just like he did his directorial debut just two years ago.

My review of Smile (2022)

Starring: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Dylan Gelula, Raúl Castillo, Peter Jacobson, Ray Nicholson, Lukas Gage, and Kyle Gallner. Directed by: Parker Finn.