In the summer of 2022, horror was on a hot streak. Fresh off the spring release of X, films like Nope, Barbarian, Pearl, and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, were filling the big screens.
If you happened to catch one of the aforementioned flicks, you probably also caught the trailer for Smile, featuring creepy too-wide grins and a seemingly disjointed attempt at a jump scare, which looked ridiculous and cheesy to say the least.
It looked so ridiculous, in fact, that my husband and I went to see it as a joke.
We’re the weirdos who actually subscribe to the AMC A-List that you hear about during the previews and think who actually goes to the movies enough to get their money’s worth?
We do.
So, since it was free (girl-math) we said, “Why the heck not?”
To my surprise, it was perhaps the scariest horror release I saw that year. Smile is a jump-scare, mystery-leaning adrenaline ride that’s not easy to watch, so much so it made my list for best jump-scare movies of all time.
Flashforward two years later, and trailers started cropping up for a sequel. This time around the nameless, faceless entity that wreaked absolute havoc on Doctor Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) in the first film would be plaguing a new character: Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a troubled pop star trying to reclaim her fame after a disastrous year.
The aesthetics that go hand-in-hand with pop stardom made the trailer so good, too good perhaps. And so, we found ourselves in the theatre again, not expecting much.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
Smile 2 was once again an unexpected smash.
If you’re unfamiliar with the first film, the gist is this: there’s a curse traveling around not much unlike the one in the 2015 cult hit It Follows.
However, instead of being transmitted through sex, this one is transferred when the afflicted is tortured enough by it to kill themselves in front of a witness. This curse causes its victim to hallucinate in a number of viscerally brutal ways, doubting every aspect of their reality, but most notably, and obviously, by seeing strangers smile at them.
Smile 2 follows Skye Riley as she works tirelessly to kick off a comeback tour after a car accident that killed her boyfriend and exposed the world to her substance abuse issues.
Chronic pain lingers from the incident and doctors offer nothing more than Tylenol because of her history, and when Skye tries to buy some pain killers from an old high school friend, she gets more than she bargained for.
Skye’s dealer kills himself in front of her, effectively transferring the smile curse. Scared to reveal that she was contemplating a relapse, Skye leaves her friend’s house without calling the cops. Cue a hell of a lot of paranoia.
What ensues is an absolute nightmare. Before receiving the curse, Skye was already hanging on by threads, physically and mentally, and with it, the entity preys on her every insecurity, of which there are plenty.
The hallucinations are brutal, abstracted in comparison to the first film because of Skye’s celebrity, and very, very real, which is hard to watch because Naomi Scott plays such a likable Skye. Her performance is fantastic in this film. Despite her deep, deep flaws, Scott makes us want Skye to be okay.
However, if you’re familiar with the original, that’s not how these movies work. This is perhaps my only complaint. Where Skye made me want to root for her even more than Rose did in the first installment, it was naïve of me to think that there was anything to root for.
Like the first film, Smile 2 teases again with the faintest whiff of the classic final girl trope, and Scott even had the final girl chops, but in order for there to be Smile 3, which there probably will be, this kind of storyline can’t be fully realized.
These movies are just about as dreadful as they come while still being mainstream horror.
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- Photo Credit: Still from "Smile 2" via Paramount Pictures
Which is to say, much like its predecessor, Smile 2 is the kind of movie to watch when you want to be scared. It is not the kind of movie that you can relax into. The jump scares are abundant, there is absolutely no comic relief, and as it went with the first, there’s even a taste of body horror.
The biggest difference between the two is the tone. Smile watches much more like mystery movie with Rose Cotter trying to untangle the cause of the curse with the help of her cop ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner). While, on the other hand, Smile 2 leaves Skye on her own and has much more of psychological horror bend.
Smile 2 makes fantastic use of Skye’s costumes and backup dancers, including one particularly unsettling choreographed scene, and Skye’s deepest trauma, the car accident, which resurfaces regularly throughout the film, creates opportunity for gore, gore, gore. All the while, the film offers subtle, but poignant commentary on the psychology of modern celebrity.
While Smile 2 was an unquestionably strong sequel, what will cement the success of this franchise is what’s to come. It’s fun to watch one or two movies that go to places even darker than you expect them to, leaving no one off limits, but eventually, there must be hope.
If no one stands a chance against the force behind the torture, what point is there to watch? Shock, gore, and clever scares can only take you so far.
Eventually, there needs to be more exposition on the rules of the curse, so that someone can at least attempt to conquer it. We were almost there with this one, but not quite—if you watch, you’ll see why.
However, this is no knock against Smile 2 as it stands today. If this is the conclusion of the franchise, which, in theory, it could be, the movies will hold up. It’s a rare case where the sequel may have even been a little bit better than the first because of how well Scott played her character.
But the truth remains, Smile 2 is one of those movies that could very well be made better or worse by the next, and when the time comes, I’ll be there.
Hopefully, this time, without any doubts.
