Smile 2
A while back I reviewed Smile and found the movie to be frustrating, due in large part to the way it squandered some effective low-key horror ideas with annoying jump-scares. Now there’s a sequel, and it… does the exact same thing. No really, the exact same thing; this could almost be a remake of the first movie, employing an identical structure and falling face-first into all of the same pitfalls, despite in many ways actually improving on its predecessor.
(Warning: major spoilers for Smile 1 follow)
Set in the immediate aftermath of the first movie’s downer ending, Smile 2 picks up with the cop boyfriend who caught the smile curse trying to remove it from himself by murdering a Russian gangster in front of the Russian gangster’s brother (who is also a Russian gangster). The plan kind of works, in that Cop Boyfriend manages to make the curse jump bodies, but instead of the Russian Gangster he accidentally transfers it to an innocent stoner who happened to be in the vicinity scoring drugs. Oh, and he also gets messily run over by one of those big American trucks immediately after, so all of that was kind of pointless.
Enter our actual protagonist, Skye Riley, a pop star trying to restart her career with a big world tour a year after flaming out in a drug and alcohol-fuelled car crash that killed her boyfriend. Skye is successfully resisting cocaine and booze, but the crash has left her with recurring back pain that no one will give her a prescription for, so one day just before proper rehearsals for the tour are starting, she visits her stoner friend to get some black market painkiller. Said friend is, of course, the unlucky dude from the prologue, and Skye happens to show up just as the Smile entity decides it’s time to jump to a new host. Cue a slow spiral into madness, just like in the first movie, but this time with the added pressures of global public attention, lingering addiction, and an overbearing Stage Mom added to the mix.
To start with, I found Skye to be an inherently more interesting and likeable protagonist than Rose Cotter from the first movie. Rose’s character was informed almost entirely by the lingering effects of trauma, which is a perfectly fine idea for a protagonist, but that mostly manifested on screen as her being all wispy and quiet and fragile all the time. Skye’s trauma is a lot fresher and she’s still resolutely in the “anger” phase, meaning she reacts to the bad shit happening to her—including the Smile demon—more proactively, by lashing out and trying to do shit rather than withdrawing into defensive mode. Not always productively mind you, but I still appreciated a main character who doesn’t seem like she’s passively along for the ride the way Rose was.
The other thing the movie does that earned my affection was not trying to explain the origin or nature of the entity any more than the first movie did. The temptation to do so must have been fierce, and the movie even brings in a character who would have been perfect for the role, in the form of your standard horror movie Guy Who Knows Things. But it turns out his knowledge of the entity doesn’t extend any further than what Rose managed to figure out, so by the end of the film we’re no closer to finding out what this thing is or where it came from than we were before. I’m really hoping future sequels keep it that way. (Exposition Guy does refer to it as a “demon” but this is clearly just him trying to frame the concept in a way that Skye would understand, as opposed to any objective statement of fact).
Apart from this, Smile 2 is just a tighter, better-made movie in every regard. The pacing is faster, the scenes depicting Skye’s mental breakdown feel more natural and less tedious than Rose’s equivalent scenes in the first movie. I particularly like that this time around Skye’s entity-induced public freakouts are both a bit more subtle than what Rose was doing, and also have more grounding in her recent past—we see from some news stories that she was in the habit of flipping out and ranting at people during the apex of her drug roller-coaster ride, so it makes complete sense that when she starts doing that again, everyone just assumes she’s back on drugs. Probably for this reason, Skye never makes a serious attempt to tell anyone else about what she’s experiencing, realising that doing so will be pointless.
All of this represents a welcome tightening of the first movie’s format, but the problem is that that’s all Smile 2 is doing—it’s basically identical in structure to its predecessor, down to copying beats like the main character having a secret about a loved one’s death that she hasn’t told anyone else, which we find out at roughly the same point in the plot in both cases. The machinations of the Smile entity have evolved somewhat (I particularly liked the part where it mimics a whole group of dancers in Skye’s apartment), but they’re still way too similar to what it was doing in the first movie, down to repeating the “main character thinks she’s talking in person to a trusted friend, only for that friend to call her on the phone” scene.
One thing Smile 2 really takes from the first movie and goes hog wild with is the entity’s ability to induce full-on alternate-reality hallucinations. It does this to Rose right at the end of the first movie, as part of the fake-out ending where it seems that Rose was won, which felt like a suitably dramatic climax. Here, it’s revealed that roughly the last third of the movie—which includes a lot of the most dramatic and terrifying bouts of Skye’s mental breakdown—never actually happened, all of it being a smile-induced hallucination. I think this is supposed to feel bleak and hopeless, but it makes the entity seem way too powerful and makes a lot of the movie feel like a pointless diversion.
What Smile 2 doesn’t deviate from at all is its over-reliance on cheap jump scares. I would have to watch them both again back-to-back to be sure, but I feel like the sequel might actually be worse in this regard. Over and over again, it builds up a really effective, subtle scare, only to ruin it by having a ghost pop out of the side of the frame or the person the smile entity is mimicking do a scary monster face while loud music plays. I don’t know whether this is a studio mandate or just something that the director thinks is good horror filmmaking (the short movie that inspired Smile has the same thing, for whatever that’s worth), but I really hope future sequels drop this technique.
Ah yes, sequels. The one moment where Smile 2 definitively and unambiguously breaks from the format of the first movie is in its ending, not so much for what happens but in terms of what it implies that Smile 3 (which has been green-lit already) is going to be about. I won’t go into spoilers, but if the next movie doesn’t chicken out of the implications of this movie’s ending, it’s by necessity going to be very different from Smile 1 and 2, to the point of potentially being in a different genre. This is exciting, but I can’t shake the feeling that that ending is the only reason this movie exists, like someone had a killer idea for where the series could go next, realised there was no clean way to bridge the gap between the end of the first movie and that idea, and then decided to effectively remake it but with a different ending this time.
One more thing I wanted to mention before closing out: this is maybe the only example I’ve ever seen of a movie about a fictional pop star where we hear significant chunks of their music, and it actually sounds like the sort of thing you could imagine being popular in real life. Even Skye’s stage outfits and concert special effects look pretty genuine. It’s a small thing, but it stood out to me and made the plot seem more believable.