‘Smile 2’: Shinier, Spookier, Sadder

Horror is just trauma therapy masked as a metaphysical infectious parasite that drives you insane. Just ask jump-scare auteur Parker Finn, who continues his 2022 creepy put-on-a-happy-face hit Smile with the sleeker, shinier, spookier, shoutier, sadder installment Smile 2. Like a cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Ring, with a generous dash of Dr. Phil sprinkled on top, Smile 2 continues its predecessor’s conflation of scary monsters with unresolved mental scars. Haunted by survivor’s guilt? Mommy issues? Severed relationships with a BFF? Smile 2 has you covered, and throws in lots of rent flesh to boot.

SMILE 2  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Parker Finn
Written by: Parker Finn
Starring: Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White
Running time: 127 mins

Watching a possessed person commit suicide in front of you means that you then become possessed and eventually kill yourself within a week. In the meantime, someone in your daily life—real or imagined—may or may not slowly turn to you and give you a demented smirk. Which is a sign of the infection getting worse. Or is  life becoming a waking nightmare,  just a hallucination, or something else? Anyway, it’s bad. And if you’re the type of person who’s struggling with heavy emotional baggage, it’s even worse. 

Mega pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) calls it a “crazy weird fever dream.” She got the supernatural disease when her twitchy freaked-out drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) unexpectedly calms down, turns that frown upside-down and peacefully pummels his own face with a 35lb weight. All she wanted was a Vicodin for her back pain, and now some psychotic phantom is mind-fucking her. The timing is terrible: she’s just about to relaunch her wildly successful concert tour! Which she had to put on hold a year ago when an alcohol and substance abuse problem led to her causing a car crash that killed her actor boyfriend Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson). Nicholson, by the way, is Jack Nicholson’s son, and having him be one of the leering bogeymen is as inspired as it is insipid.

“Every good thing in my life becomes broken because of me!” Skye confesses through tears, and she’s not wrong. But she also has a demon spirit scrambling her sense of reality. Cut yourself some slack, girl! Smile 2 is a cautionary tale for those who don’t practice enough self-care. It’s also an impressive showcase for Naomi Scott’s stamina as a performer. She has to wheel through umpteen facial variations of shock while also violently scrambling backwards like a startled crab. The best words to encapsulate her emotive arc: Yikes! Yikes! Yikes!

Finn is a mischievous filmmaker who knows how to conjure a palpable sense of dread while mixing in surprising laughs to puncture the tension. At one point, Skye Googles “does vomit have DNA” in a paranoid panic; later she makes her best friend palpably shudder at the thought of driving to Staten Island. There’s even a Star-Is-Born-quality meltdown while Skye is making an on-stage presentation at a black-tie ballroom benefit—and ends up bodyslamming an old woman onto one of the dinner tables. 

But there are a few too many slow-burn pacing decisions that defuse the growing suspense by overmilking the moment. It’s the same inevitably leaden rhythm that permeated Smile, and here plumps up the Smile 2 running time over the two-hour mark. The long stretches of silence are so indulged that you’re already anticipating when the latest shock of jolting music is going to strike.

Rosemarie DeWitt is also in this cheeky freak-out, as Skye’s put-upon mother-turned-manager who is struggling to damage control her daughter’s every outburst and increasingly unstable episodes. She also insists that Skye stay hydrated, which just seems like a product-placement excuse to give sponsored content like Voss Water as much screen time as possible. There are more Voss Water bottles here than there are people smiling. Which I’m sure is making the Voss Water people smile.

 Constructing Smile 2 all around a cracking-under-the-pressure Lady Gaga type who is losing her sense of sanity is a playfully inspired stand-alone sequel idea—a cold open featuring the previous film’s last man standing is the only character-related connective tissue in the narrative—which bodes well for the franchise’s future. Maybe Smile 3 will follow a veterinarian’s freakout wrestling with unpacked pet-related psychological issues while all the dog and cat patients are grinning maniacally. Insert your favorite vocation, insert your favorite trauma. I’m sure, considering all those plug-and-play possibilities, the studio is beaming.