Smile 2 review: a messier, bolder horror sequel

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In many ways, Smile 2 is everything a sequel to a successful, studio-produced horror film should be. It is bigger and scarier than its growing franchise’s first installment, and it features more virtuosic creative swings on the part of returning writer-director Parker Finn. Armed with a bigger budget this time around, Finn immediately ups the ante in Smile 2, which opens with a muscular, sustained piece of bravura filmmaking that both neatly and absurdly bridges the gap between its film’s plot and its predecessor’s. This sequence, impressive in its confidence, if logically thin, feels like it could have been pulled straight out of a non-Smile film. It proves, more than anything else, that Finn is a commanding visual craftsman — one capable of thriving even outside the confines of the horror genre.

His grasp on pace, exposition, and dramatic logic leaves plenty to be desired, though. Smile 2 not only adopts the same confusing, murky narrative tricks as its parent film, but also tries to take them even further. It blurs the line between its character’s reality and her hallucinations so aggressively that it causes more confused bouts of head-scratching than it does the kind of audible, shocked gasps it is clearly striving to elicit. These issues, while not fatal to the film’s success, are made worse when it is revealed that Smile 2 has been marching toward a high-concept, admittedly applause-worthy punch line the whole time.

It’s a sequel that largely proves to be, much to its detriment in its second half, slavishly devoted to the template set by its parent film, but Smile 2 still delivers bursts of originality and finds ways of differentiating itself. The biggest and most inspired of these is its shift in perspective. Whereas the first Smile centered around an unlikely therapist whose everyday life was purposefully and decidedly ordinary, its sequel follows Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a world-famous pop star hoping to rebound from a spree of public scandals and a car accident that left her scarred and in chronic pain, and that killed her equally famous actor boyfriend (Ray Nicholson). When Skye decides to meet up one night with Lewis (Lukas Gage), her former drug dealer, and buy a few pain meds from him, her fragile celebrity existence is shattered.

She witnesses Lewis brutally commit suicide in front of her and, though she doesn’t realize it at first, ends up the latest recipient of the same curse that plagued the characters in Smile. Before long, she is experiencing hallucinations of unblinking, ever-smiling specters and losing more and more of her grasp on reality itself. The cause of Skye’s frightening visions will be apparent right from the start to Smile fans. Finn’s sequel still finds the time nonetheless for a midpoint exposition dump in a New York City bar that — like several of Smile 2‘s second-act scenes — suffers from the film’s fast-and-loose commitment to its own, already heightened sense of reality.

Smile 2 is no less cruel or mean-spirited than its parent film. On the contrary, the sequel is arguably more so. Skye is a character who, as Finn establishes early on with an unnerving cut to her literally pulling some of her own hair out, is already suffering from tremendous amounts of self-doubt, stress, guilt, and shame by the time Smile 2 begins. That makes her an easy target for the film’s ever-present monster — a parasitic demon that feeds on its victims’ trauma until there’s nothing left for it to mentally devour. By focusing this time on a celebrity, though, Smile 2 smartly manages to imbue Skye’s outbursts and hallucinations with even more weight than those experienced by Sosie Bacon’s Rose in the first Smile. Skye has more to lose — not just her life, but her reputation and the credit she’s fought to reclaim with her fans and her personal entourage.

In this case, Smile 2‘s character work is sharper than that of its parent film’s. Finn efficiently builds out Skye’s unsteady celebrity existence in the sequel’s opening minutes and then spends the next hour burrowing further into the tortured mental landscape of her mind. We become intimately familiar with her fears and insecurities, and the more specific Smile 2‘s horror sequences are — like when Skye finds a trail of her creepy stalker’s clothes on the floor of her apartment — the closer to her we feel. Luckily for him, Finn has an extremely game partner in this endeavor in Scott, who gets dragged through the emotional and physical wringer throughout Smile 2. As Skye, she turns in a performance that is pitched so consistently high that her character’s disintegration feels less like a slow spiral into tragedy and more like an electric cable coming apart and sending sparks everywhere.

Unfortunately, Finn doesn’t have the full confidence in Scott’s performance that it deserves and proves incapable of curbing his own, most self-indulgent instincts. Smile 2 runs over two hours long, but only earns 100 of its 127 minutes. It drags on longer than it should and stretches Skye’s torment out to the point that it not only becomes repetitive, but numbingly dour and unforgiving. This, coupled with the film’s disinterest in sticking to any kind of decipherable law of reality, only makes watching its final 30 minutes all the more frustrating and confounding. The sequel, however, isn’t afraid to go to darker and even more violent places than its predecessor — and this results in it delivering a few images and set pieces that are more memorable than any in the original Smile. At the same time, the film tries to play by an even less defined set of rules. These two conflicting, incongruous impulses lead to Smile 2 hitting the same core dramatic beats as 2022’s Smile in flashier fashion, but with far less impact.

Its protagonist’s outsized celebrity life gives Smile 2 the chance to indulge in some welcome bits of absurdist black comedy. The film doesn’t ultimately find the right balance of humor and horror, though. As a filmmaker, Finn seems interested in crafting horror stories that double as character studies, but that desire sometimes conflicts with his meaner, trashier sensibilities. Here, he further hones his skills as a visual storyteller and packs Smile 2 with set pieces that frequently feel both disorientingly uncanny and suffocatingly tactile.

Of all of the film’s horror gags, few feel like they better crystalize his absurdist horror taste than when Skye finds herself ambushed in her apartment by smiling doppelgängers of her background dancers, who clog her hallways by stacking themselves on top of each other before swarming her from all sides. These moments are breathtaking to watch unfold, but they’re not enough to stop Smile 2 from leaning so far into its own brutality that it tips over.

Its climax is a sparkling, ingenious horror comedy feat, but one that Finn takes a needlessly convoluted and confusing path to reach. The film’s ending seems designed to leave you grinning with macabre glee from ear to ear, but that smile is destined to fade, once your many unanswered questions about Smile 2‘s story inevitably flood back into your mind.

Smile 2 is now playing in theaters.