Back in 2022, Parker Finn fixed us with a Smile that was surprisingly effective despite essentially being incredibly derivative of other movies such as The Ring and Drag Me To Hell and thus, a grin inducing amount of money rolled in that has allowed him to make that Smile even wider. That’s right, we now have yet another horror franchise on the block, but while that grinning, multi-mouthed, demonic parasite may be back for more jump scares and harrowing hallucinations, Finn has taken steps to ensure that his fun, but familiar horror is anything but a standard retread.
Where the first movie saw Sosie Bacon’s tense therapist battle inner demons both figurative and literal, the sequel broadens its scope to focus in a troubled pop star fresh out of rehab that has all the juicy past trauma and mental turmoil a growing creature needs to sustain itself for six days – but what if the monster doesn’t just want to feed anymore? What if it wants more?
Grammy award winning pop starlet Skye Riley is on the comeback trail and is on the verge of launching into a huge tour after a very public battle with drugs and a near-fatal car crash that took the life of her actor boyfriend, Paul Hudson. However, since being officially clean for a year, the pain from an injured back and the stress of the tour prep means that she’s secretly been scoring vicodin, although it’s strictly for medical purposes – but when she runs out, she has to score an emergency dose from her long term drug dealer, Lewis.
However, when she arrives at Lewis’ apartment, she finds him in a frenzied state of panic due to him being horrifically paranoid, sleep deprived and pounding back more drugs than Ozzy Osborne on a day off, but matters get even worse when Lewis suddenly becomes eerily calm and then starts battering his own face to pieces with a gym weight, all the while maintaining a fixed, creepy grin.
Of course, what Skye can’t possibly know is that by witnessing Lewis’ suicide, she’s now been infected by the parasitic, supernatural entity that forced her dealer to kill himself in front of a witness and now she’s on a deadly clock in which, after six days of this creature trying its best to drive her insane with ghastly visions, the same fate will befall her.
However, blissfully unaware of the malevolent spirit literally living rent free in her head, Skye muscles on with the tour and tries to juggle her stressful workload that includes benefit dinners, fan signings and endless dance practising – but while her domineering mother keeps her moving at a fair old pace, the constant nightmarish hallucinations she keeps experiencing is making it look to the outside world that she’s falling spectacularly off the wagon.
As the six days tick down and the entity’s hold strengthens, hope seems to emerge from an unlikely source – but can Skye trust a single thing that her brain is showing her, or is this creature manipulating her brain as deftly as the rat from Ratatouille?
As I mentioned earlier, the first Smile was a nicely intense frightener that made up for its rather over-familiar set up with a slick, visual style (gotta love those upside-down exterior shots) and a truly disorientating antagonist that delivered some legitimately great jump scares and some nicely fucked up gore. Well, it seems that returning director Parker Finn has decided to keep the same engine rumbling away in Smile’s chassis, but has decided to upgrade the body work by making his sequel not much more than a variation of the first films themes – however, the change of protagonist is so extreme it smartly manages to make what’s essentially the exact same scenario feel like a completely different movie.
The basics couldn’t be more similar – troubled woman finds her life and sanity being dismantled by a supernatural force – and yet the switch to world famous pop star proves to be something of a minor revelation as the pressures of superstardom proves to be fertile horror ground as it riffs on similar, real life melt downs such as the unfortunate mental strain celebrities such as Britney Spears has suffered while being on the public eye. However, there’s a real sense that Finn has matured more as a filmmaker and uses his greatly expanded canvas to deliver far more complicated set pieces (Skye getting attacked by interpretive dance by her dancers in her apartment; a complex opening which shows the fate of Kyle Gardener’s Joel from the first film) while wisely keeping the leering entity itself largely an off screen menace.
However, MVP of the movie has to be Naomi Scott, who after flashier roles in the likes of Alladin, Charlie’s Angels and the Power Rangers reboot, delivers an impressive, balls out performance that alternates between her doing the usual pop star stuff and glugging down endless bottles of Voss water (seriously, we’re talking gallons across the whole film), and her utterly losing her mind while being completely drenched in her own snot and tears. In a year full of strong performances by actresses in horror flicks, Scott acquits herself magnificently as mania and horror take full hold while reality dissappear out the side door to smoke a lunchtime cigarette.
There’s the occasional speed bump here and there. For a start, the movie is blatantly too long and is often in danger of repeating itself and some may balk at the final twist which – while appropriately cruel for a very mean movie – feels a little bit like cheating as it veers dangerously to a far nastier version of the “it was all a dream” trope than some might like. However, it does set up and absolute belter if an ending which may have massive ramifications if a Smile 3 was ever to crease the face of horror cinema and it’s difficult to be too hard on the movie when it’s obviously busting its gut to be as unsettling as it possibly can.
Add to this some clever casting – Jack Nicholson’s son, Ray, proves that his got his old man’s grin as he’s perfectly deployed as Skye dead boyfriend – and some truly outlandish gore that proves to legitimately squirm inducing (Finn really has it out for facial features this time around, so brace yourself), and you have yourself a sequel that succeeds in dispelling any lingering niggles I had with the more derivative aspects of the original movie. In fact, for a while there, I was genuinely unsure whether to penalise Finn’s feature debut in my rating for the first film for that very reason, but the fact that I didn’t even remotely feel the urge to do that here inly proves that we now have a franchise that can stand on its own, two, skinless, fucked up legs.
An expanded canvas and a bold set up means that Smile 2 proves to be something of a superior sequel, but an ending that hints at an even larger scale means that this is one movie that succeeds in putting a metaphorical you-know-what on your face.
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