If 2022’s Smile slapped a grin on anybody’s face, it was that of first-time director Parker Finn, who spun a simple yet effective horror about a malevolent, smirking entity into over $217 million in box-office receipts. Unsurprisingly, he’s now been given the opportunity to craft a grander, more lavishly appointed sequel, one that picks up six days after the original and continues the smirking spectre’s campaign of pass-the-parcel possession.
It would be pro forma for a cash-injected horror sequel to expand upon its original premise, prying further into a mythology that the original only hinted at and teasing out fresh ideas to mix things up. Finn, however, takes a different approach. With no desire to demystify his grinning monstrosity, the writer/director opts instead for what is essentially a retread of the first film’s formula, though examined through a different lens. Where previously his daisy-chain demon had a psychologist wrestling with her own mind in a blunt yet undeniably creepy examination of mental health and the effects of trauma, this sequel takes a swing at modern celebrity and the harsh, unblinking stare of the public eye.
After a breathlessly effective single-shot prologue linking the two films, Smile 2 wastes little time in flashing its heightened budget, dropping a quick Drew Barrymore cameo before drawing us into the heavily sequinned world of pop sensation Skye Riley (superbly performed — on and off mic — by former pink Power Ranger and Princess Jasmine Naomi Scott). Riley is poised to embark upon a huge tour, one year after her drug and alcohol abuse crescendoed with a lethal car crash that left her bearing scars inside and out. But, after witnessing her dealer pulverise his own face with a free weight, she begins to see dead-eyed rictus faces wherever she turns — ones considerably more sinister than the looks of sycophantic affirmation she’s accustomed to.
The scares are judiciously deployed.
The eponymous smile is double-edged this time around as Riley, still reeling from her own trauma, is forced to slap on a happy face and perform on demand — ‘lights, camera, bitch, smile’ — regardless of the physical and mental toll as she cries backstage, nervously yanking out clumps of her hair. And when increasingly nightmarish visions fray her nerves further and blur the lines between what’s real and what’s not, Riley’s resulting unravelling is a painfully public one.
A world in which fake smiles are the norm makes for an apt canvas here, allowing Finn to have tremendous fun with everything from grip-and-grin photo ops and frenzied fans, to lickspittle aides, diva behaviour and celebrity stalkers (restraining orders being of limited use when your pursuer is a murderous demon). If you ever wondered what kind of pressure might make a performer demand a basket of kittens be included in their rider, this provides a particularly extreme example. But while the commentary definitely has teeth (as well as knives, and sharp bits of glass), the two-hours-plus runtime robs it of momentum and labours the point where economy might have served better.
The scares, by contrast, are judiciously deployed, Finn once more relying on a gradual sense of general unease punctuated by an assortment of gruesome, uncomfortably close-up body-horror moments (from compound fractures to dislocated jaws and a particularly wince-inducing IV) to drive the point home — accompanied by some upsettingly squelchy foley work. The hallucinatory fake-outs are largely effective and occasionally inspired (death by backing dancers!), but simply knowing that’s what they are, and the rules of the possession that have carried over from the previous film, leeches tension and slightly deflates the otherwise good horror set-pieces.
Smile 2 is a louder, larger, shinier and more ambitious treatment of the first film’s captivating premise, with an impressively ragged turn from Scott, all wrapped up in critique of the entertainment machine. But in an example of bigger not always being better, it doesn’t tap into the original’s unsettling premise quite as effectively. A gentle smirk rather than an ear-to-ear grin.
