The following review contains spoilers to 2024’s Smile 2.
Smile 2 debuted October 18th to a wave of hungry horror fans. Following its 2022 predecessor Smile, which passed $200 million dollars worldwide and topped the box office on its opening weekend, Smile 2 expands Parker Finn’s directorial debut to unseen heights. In Smile 2 the stakes—and stage—are higher.
Allow me to me explain.
Smile 2: The Mechanics
Building off Smile’s original timeline, the film picks up about a week after where the original ended. After watching his ex-girlfriend Rose Cutter (Sosie Bacon), the main protagonist of Smile, kill herself in front of him, Joel (Kyle Gallner) finds himself infected with the Smile disease.
Inadvertently, he passes the demonic entity onto drug dealer Lewis Fregoli (Lukas Gage) who witnesses him get hit by a truck, resulting in his demise.
As Smile fans know, this means the entity has no been transferred to Lewis. Lewis succumbs as well, bashing his head in with a weight in front of the darling pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott). As he does so, his face is fixed in an increasingly unnerving smile until he collapses.
Enter Skye Riley, a Grammy-winning artist trying to make a comeback back after a drug-addled car crash, in which her passenger and boyfriend Paul, is killed. Now, having witnessed Lewis’s death, Riley must grapple with the entity.
Things start off creepy enough. First, Skye gets a text from an unknown number claiming to know she was there when Fregoli died. From there, things take a sinister turn.
As Riley while looking in a mirror preparing for a show, the late Lewis appears behind her. Forcing his fingers into her mouth, he pulls it into a smile before evaporating into thin air. She heaves and pulls at her outfit.
Naomi’s acting in this scene is award-worthy. The contrast of her mouth being forced into a smile coupled with the sheer terror in her eyes before shreiking and smashing the mirror is electric. I gasped with fleeting relief when she broke the mirror, as if that would be the end of it. But deep down, I knew it wasn’t.
Skye descends into madness. In one hallucination, she comes home to a slew of backup dancers chasing her in a scene as acrobatic as Suspiria. She fights against the inevitable tooth and nail. But understanding the gravity of the situation, she turns to the mysterious texter, who agrees to meet up with her.
The texter turns out to be an ER nurse named Morris (Peter Jacobson). Morris assures her there is a way out—but it’s not going to be easy. In order to eradicate the entity, Morris says he will have to stop her heart. Once the entity is eradicated, he will resuscitate her.
At first, Riley rejects this plan, understandably, considering its risk profile. Despite her distressing encounters with the entity’s powers, Riley seems to be in deniable about the inevitability of her fate. She apparently still has some hope at this juncture.
But that hope is short lived. Her hallucinations grow stronger and more frequent. When she takes Morris up, texting him to meet one day before she’s due to meet her fate. But by then, the entity has already taken total control.
Smile 2: Themes and Analysis
What’s intriguing about Smile 2 is that even without the central horror element—that is, the entity—the movie’s characters have a rich enough backstory all on their own to keep things interesting.
Riley, who tries to resist her drug addiction in these trying circumstances, finds herself subject to a demonic-entity-induced trip of horrific proportions.
But what is the entity? Is it a metaphor for Riley’s battle with addiction? Or perhaps even more importantly, the underlying mental anguish that had her turning to it in the first place? After all, the events of Smile 2 begin with the cessation of her self-medication.
This thematic thread deepens the connection to the original film. Rose, the first movie’s central character, was grappling with her own trauma after witnessing the overdose death of her mother.
I’m Polish, and there is a not-quite-translatable word we have for this: przezywam. Though it literally translates to “I’m living it,” connotatively, it is specific to traumatic experiences. If effect, it’s a way of saying that a bad experience is still part of the present, coloring the lens of the now. It’s more akin to haunting than living, and by the past, not a spirit.
To build on this, the hallucinations seen by those possessed by the entity are often related their past traumas. Skye Riley, for example, is riddled with guilt about the car accident that lead to the death of her boyfriend Paul. The entity forces her to relive Paul’s final moments. And Rose is sees her mother in her final confrontation with the entity.
Unlike Smile, which hints there is some way out, Smile 2 seems snuff out hope.
Smile laid the groundwork for a solid franchise which Smile 2 builds upon, leaning into frenetic paranoia with little to no apology.
The sequel’s marketing has been similarly experimental. Paramount Pictures recently created an online portal offering a free screening of the film’s opening scene. But there’s a catch: Viewers must turn their cameras on and maintain a smile for the scene’s 7-minute duration.
Smile 2 lays the groundwork for Smile 3 to play out on an even bigger scale. Ultimately, Riley succumbs to the entity on stage in front of thousands of fans. And that’s where Smile 2 leaves us.
Smile was a big hit among horror fans, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 77%. Surprisingly, Smile 2 is slightly outperforming the original with a score of 81% with audiences.
As a fan of horror and the franchise, I am inclined to agree. Passage of the Smile entity from person to person could go on forever, but risks going the way of the Saw series, diluting the core backstory with a brinkmanship of situational sadism.
But the film’s ending promises something different for Smile 3—collective trauma. It seems like a tall order to pull off well—but I for one will go into it with an open mind about where Parker Finn will take this.
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