SMILE 2 [2024]

Smile 2 (2024)
Directed by: Parker Finn
Written by: Parker Finn
Starring: Lukas Gage, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt

USA

IN CINEMAS NOW

RUNNING TIME: 127 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

Six days after witnessing Rose Cotter’s suicide and having the Smile Demon’s curse passed onto him, police officer Joel attempts to pass it on by confronting two criminals, but it’s drug dealer Lewis Fregoli who inherits the curse while Joel is killed by an oncoming pickup truck. In New York City, Grammy-winning pop star Skye Riley prepares for her comeback tour after a public struggle with drugs and alcohol and a car crash that killed her boyfriend, actor Paul Hudson. However, her back still gives her pain so she’s been  buying Vicodin from Lewis. When she witnesses him, in a manic state, smile and kill himself, Skye flees, too afraid to call the police and reveal her presence, and the curse soon manifests as Skye experiences hallucinations which threaten to ruin her comeback….

What’s in a smile? We tend to smile when we’re happy but others may not always interpret them as happy things. And sometimes a smile can be sinister, scary or even full-blown evil. One of the smiles my ex made still haunts me – but of course this isn’t the time and place to go into all that. The idea of a smile not always being a pleasant thing has been employed extremely often, from 1929’s The Man Who Laughs to our seemingly ubiquitous friend the Joker, so the premise of Smile, which was originally intended to go straight to streaming, was one which one wonders hadn’t been used before. A fair amount of imagery and ideas from the likes of The Ring and It Follows also couldn’t help but contribute to writer / director Parker Finn’s debut feature [based on a short film he made] not seeming particularly fresh; even the idea of an entity feeding of trauma was hardly original. However, the melding of all this did result in a horror movie which was often frightening and exciting and did most of the things a horror movie should do. Finn said soon after its release that there’d be sequels, though I doubt that the announcement of Smile 2 surprised those who didn’t even know that. He also said that he’d develop the Smile universe, though to be perfectly honest he hasn’t really done that here; we don’t even learn much more about the Smile Demon [as I’ve called it as it still doesn’t seem to have a name]. Smile 2 is a film which follows the template of its predecessor very much, but that’s okay, because it’s also scarier, more intense, better filmed with Finn really improving as a filmmaker, and with a quite superb lead performance. Perhaps the best thing about it is that you could take away the fantastical stuff, or have it as entirely imaginary, and still be left with a pretty good movie.

The first scene, most of which is shot in one take from a handheld camera, follows straight on from the end of the first film, and won’t make any sense if you haven’t seen it, though if you enter the auditorium five minutes late the experience will be better if you do indeed decide to check out the sequel before the original, and we’ve all done it, especially when we were young; I saw all the Hammer Draculas on TV in the wrong order and most of those actually follow on from each other. So it’s six days after Rose Cotter killed herself and passed the Smile Demon’s curse onto police officer Joel. He, like most people who have a curse put upon them, just wants to pass it on to somebody else, so he confronts two criminals, intending to make one of them his witness. After killing one, the intended witness dies in a shootout. However, drug dealer Lewis Fregoli inadvertently witnesses the event and inherits the curse. Now free, Joel attempts to flee more approaching criminals but is killed by an oncoming pickup truck in a very good scene indeed. The death happens offscreen, and one can almost hear the gore-hounds tutting, but then a high angle shot, which gets steadily higher, reveals an incredibly wide and lengthy trail of blood, revealing first a severed arm, then eventually, after some time, masses of viscera in the [now] distance! Now we meet our heroine, singer Skye Riley getting ready for her first tour after surviving a car crash which killed actor Paul Hudson, the two of them being a celeb couple. She’d gotten heavily into drugs and alcohol, and is virtually clean now, but is secretly taking Vicolin for back pain despite constant supervision from her mother and manager Elizabeth and assistant Joshua.

Syke sneaks out to buy additional Vicolin from Lewis, who’s also an old school friend, but he borderline attacks her on sight. He’s really nervous about something but what can it be? He then smiles manically before killing himself in a manner that I won’t reveal but which is satisfyingly shocking. Yes, the gore has been ramped up for this one, though it doesn’t get anywhere close to Art the Clown’s latest killing spree which bordered on being “too much” even for this critic. Skye flees and begins to experience a whole load of physical and auditory hallucinations,  causing her already fragile mental health to deteriorate rapidly. Desperate, she contacts her estranged best friend Gemma – though I wondered at times if they’d been girlfriends [or am I just picking up on things that aren’t there at all?] – and they reconcile. Skye then receives a text from an unknown number, warning her that it’s known that she was at Lewis’ apartment and that she’s in danger. She does okay signing autographs for fans until a creepy guy intimidates her and to her develops “the” smile, but, at a charity event where she’s been invited to speak, the teleprompter appears to her to stall, one of several scenes that cleverly play on relatable fears, forcing Skye to improvise her speech which is supposed to be inspirational, but instead she embarrasses herself by ranting on how music has never inspired her at all. From the shocked audience, she sees a smiling “Paul” begin to approach her and accidentally knocks an elderly patron off the stage. Seeking answers, Skye meets the persistent unknown texter, Morris, who explains how he got her number and tells her what’s going on, not to mention suggesting a rather bonkers scheme.

There are more jump scares than in the first one, and experienced readers of my ramblings will know how I think they’re overused in modern horror and can easily become tedious. However, most of the “BOO”s work here, so much that two or three of them don’t need the obligatory musical sting. A good example is Skye imagining an apparition in several glass doors; the imagery is scary enough without the loud chord. The most frightening scene is probably when she’s menaced by a whole bunch of smiling versions of familiar characters. The use of CG is very restrained throughout until the climax where it’s very noticeable by how poor some shots are. By now things have started to go down Substance lines before a rather cheap and extremely cliched reveal [though there’s a surprise earlier on which is quite startling, where even I nearly cried “oh shit”!] and a final scene which certainly leaves more doors to be explored. The gore includes a great suicide by a piece of glass which may stick in the mind. It’s shocking, convincing and upsetting, and so much more effective than anything we saw in Terrifier 3 which lingered on and pushed the carnage to great extremes and just got ridiculous. Smile 2 reunites Finn with the majority of the crew from the original, and it seems that many took the opportunity to top their previous work, especially cinematographer Charlie Sonoff who uses lighting superbly. His liking for upside down shots doesn’t dominate so it becomes irritating: instead it aids in creating the hugely ominous atmosphere this film has, despite its overall fast pacing which makes it in no way seem like over two hours long.

I liked the way that Skye turns to guzzling bottled water when drug cravings hit, even if she always ensures that she keeps the label so that we can clearly is, in a film with more obvious product placement than I’ve noticed in a way. Nonetheless the amount of time the film focuses on Sky’s life as a pop star in no way slows things down and, while we don’t get a particularly nuanced look at the subject, we shouldn’t really expect a film like this to attempt to do so, and we do most certainly sympathise with Skye’s situation. Of course she’s rich in a way that most of us will never be, but one can only dislike the way that she’s largely controlled and harshly pushed, and be reminded of how this is the case for so many who have taken up the same career. Naomi Scott delivers a terrific performance; gutsy, impassioned and always believable even when depicting her character’s star power, and which has probably made me something of a fan which her performing in the Aladdin and Charlie’s Angels remakes never came anywhere close to doing. I hope that it’s widely noticed and that she gets similarly good roles as a result of her work here. She’s not afraid to make her character rather unpleasant at times, which is fine because we still always sympathise with her. As with Smile, the central theme is trauma, a subject that’s maybe become overused of late in such films, even if it fits the horror genre like a glove. An explanation is eventually given as to why she’s as disturbed as she is, shown visually as it should be, and it does make us understand her more, though it slightly suffers from a rather cartoony performance by somebody.

As for the Smile Demon itself, we don’t get to know he or she or it much more than we did before, which I guess is appropriate considering it’s more metaphorical than anything else, but I hope that, if Finn decides to continue with this series, he does give more clarity to his bogeyman. Christobal Tapia de Veer’s score generates quite a disturbing ambience, though the songs that Scott has to sing are as dreary as the things that Saleka Shyamalan sung in Trap for those of us dinosaurs who find so much of modern pop to be samey and boring. Nonetheless Smile 2, which does have its occasional humorous touches i.e. a shot of a cocaine-strewn table as an offscreen weatherman reports on “the first snow of the season” without losing its intensity, is one of the best horror sequels in some time. For a lot of the time it manages to operate on two levels yet also has fairly cohesive plotting which fussy me only spotted one minor hole in. It’s frequently great to look at but delivers the frights. Of course I can only but smile as I type this.

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