Grin and Grin Again
Oh, hells yes. Parker Finn outdoes himself with a gorier, funnier, smarter spin on his grinning demon thingy.
Smile 2
Director: Parker Finn • Writer: Parker Finn
Starring: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Peter Jacobson
USA • 2hrs 8mins
Opens Hong Kong Oct 17 • III
Grade: B+
Evidently, 2024 is the year of the pop star at the centre of a horror-thriller. In the wake of Trap, Smile 2 stars Naomi Scott as Skye Riley, a hugely popular, recovering drug addict pop diva embarking on an Eras/Blonde Ambition-type world tour she’s not ready for a year after a very public meltdown. After that a car wreck broke her leg, put her in surgery and killed her actor boyfriend (Jack’s kid, Ray Nicholson). Difference is, Smile 2 picks up where writer-director Parker Finn left off with his surprise hit Smile, a ghoulier riff on It Follows in 2022, and doubles down on the madness and gore, leaving the backstory and lore in a roadside gutter. That was the right choice. Smile 2 is creepier, grosser, funnier (I know, right?) and way more entertaining (if a touch long) than the first film. Rarely does the sequel surpass the original (the GOAT being The Empire Strikes Back), but Finn’s laser focus on Skye’s deteriorating mental health and stability, and commitment to one-upping himself in the best ways possible pays off big time. Scott, best known for Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin and Elizabeth Banks’s Charlie’s Angels, is by far the most interesting she’s been on screen to date and anchors Skye’s downward spiral with just the right doses of terror, rage, desperation and loneliness.
Who doesn’t love a diva?
Skye runs afoul of the body horror-ready demon parasite possessing thingy after she sneaks out of her fab Manhattan apartment following rehearsal. She has to dodge her momager Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt, The Boys, La La Land) and PA Josh (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) because she needs some real painkillers for her back, not that weak-ass Tylenol 3 shit, but as a recovering addict can’t get a scrip for something stronger. So she sucks it up and goes to her old friend and dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage). Thing is, Lewis has just had a run-in with Joel (Kyle Gallner), the cop cursed with the smile by Rose Cotter at the end of the first film. Time’s up for Lewis, and Skye witnesses his suicide. Tag, she’s it.
From there Finn immerses us in Skye’s fracturing mind as she struggles to hold it together, not reach for harder drugs, and ferret out what’s real and what she’s imagining. But there are some great dramatic currents running just beneath the surface of Smile 2, chief among them a vivid addiction metaphor, a biting comment on personal commodification and a slap upside the head for how we let so-called support networks crumble when mental health becomes the issue. Skye would do better to have cancer than implore her mother to “try and understand what it’s like inside my head.”
Which doesn’t mean Finn has abandoned the lusciously gooey practical horror, buckets of blood and judicious use of jump scares. Jump scares aren’t always cheap; you just need to know when to deploy them and Finn does. He also makes wise choices about what to show us and what not to, exploiting symmetrically framed subjective close-ups to maximise Skye’s uncertainty as well as those creepy AF grins. Once again Smile 2 is a case of the less you know, the better – though I’d love to know who the fuck uses iMessage – but Skye’s hallucination of her back-up dancers is one of the chilliest scenes of the year and a tremendous visual set piece.
Conversely little details like Skye’s music industry pal Darrius’s (Raúl Castillo) disinterest in the ultra-keen Josh (poor Josh) and Skye’s former BFF Gemma’s (Dylan Gelula, Dream Scenario) disinterest in Staten Island, as a few, add some welcome levity to an otherwise pretty grim story. We know where this is going when it starts, and while that doesn’t matter narratively it could impact tone. But Finn trims all the fat from Smile (if you enjoyed the folklore of that one you’ll be disappointed this time), and despite some busted internal logic, by the time Skye spectacularly (but hilariously) fucks up a gala as a favour to Darrius and meets up with Morris (Peter Jacobson, Fly Me to the Moon), who claims he knows how to end the entity for good, we’re only invested in Skye’s inevitable doom and how it will play out. And man, does it play.