2023 | rated R | starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Peter Jacobson | written & directed by Parker Finn | 2h 7m | 4 out of 5 stars |
Smile looks, and was advertised like your average Blumhouse jump scare gimmick-turned-horror movie. Even seemingly emulating the unnaturally fixed smile of the demon from Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare. But in Parker Finn’s Smile and now moreso with the supercharged Smile 2, the franchise (like last year’s Talk to Me) serves as a bridge between jump scare horror and A24 trauma metaphors with Smile leaning more toward the latter. Its supernatural world is a springboard to the movie’s true intention as an oh-so-fashionable Descent into Madness movie. From Black Swan to 2021’s terrific Saint Maud to this year’s Hold Your Breath we are being treated to a lot of movies about women pushed to the breaking point by life’s pressures, snapping from reality and spiraling into delusion. Smile’s trixter demon torments its victims with a curse, but the execution and structure is the same.
One year after suffering a car accident that killed her boyfriend, global pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) mounts a comeback tour. But when her painkiller hook-up dies a horrific suicide in front of her, she starts to be haunted by smiling figures and elaborate delusions as she races against the clock to stop the demon behind it from claiming her mind for good.
Following in the footsteps of 2023’s epic Terrifier 2, Smile 2 is a big sequel made by someone who is swinging for the fences, throwing every idea and the kitchen sink into this story like someone afraid they will never get another chance to make a movie like this. From it’s opening one-shot sequence to it’s final elaborate twist. It’s big but it feels lived in. Its full of nightmare sequences but feels grounded. It’s stylishly staged and pretty gnarly in the gore department. While following the same story beats as the first, Finn cranks up the paranoia and fully explores the possibilities of the seemingly thin premise here. It’s hard to criticize it as a remake of the first when nearly every beat has been broken down to the studs and rebuilt into something richer and more interesting.
This is one of those movies that is completely and totally driven on the lead performance. Naomi Scott makes this movie work by sheer force. She carries the film on her back in a performance that is raw, vulnerable, fun and relatable. Despite being a co-lead in Disney’s monster hit live-action remake of Aladdin and the 2nd reboot of Charlie’s Angels, Scott delivers a star-making performance in this movie. Watching Scott go from somber survivor to wide-eyed hysteria is a ton of fun and – frankly – drives most of this movie’s 4 star score. There is a version of Smile 2 with another lead actress in it that isn’t a fraction as good. She kills this.
There are a few terrific set pieces here. We’ve got the aformentioned one-shot opening featuring Smile survivor Kyle Gallner and the movie’s pronouncement of how gruesome it’s going to get. We’ve also got a few great sequences of smiling stalkers, a naked Asian man in the house and a hallway full of smiling backup dancers. Where the first smile was an exploration of what this curse did, Smile 2 opens up the possibility of defeating it with the late film introduction of a character familiar with it (Peter Jacobson). I’m not completely in love with the ending because of this. I’ve had my fill of movies that manipulate us with the main character’s hallucinations and this one undoes a few too many things (including the movie’s best two relationships) in the interest of a cheap last minute twist. I get it. I get the movie is conveying the horror of the situation and the sheer unbeatable power of its ethereal monster. I’ll hold that in reserve for now and let’s see if Finn can pay off on the apocalyptic ending he sets up here for Smile 3. Still, this is one of those horror movies that is going to be seen as a huge leap up from it’s predecessor and an example that the sequel isn’t something to fear.