Smile 2 Review: Is This Going to Ruin the Tour?

Parker Finn delivers the best horror movie of the year with Smile 2, reinventing the original for a stylistically thrilling and darkly funny sequel. 

However, my opinion didn’t matter much in the broader context of the movie, which grossed over $217 million at the global box office on a meager $17 million budget. It was one of the highest-grossing original horror movies of the year, and a sequel was quickly greenlit after Finn signed a first-look deal with Paramount a year ago. 

Two years later, Smile 2 is now gracing our screens, and the results are entirely different from those of the first movie. This is felt from its opening scene, a one-shot of Joel (Kyle Gallner) afflicted by the curse that killed Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) in the 2022 original. When the movie begins, picking up six days after the first film’s events, Joel’s mind is tormented by visions of pure terror as he attempts to pass on the curse to someone else before it’s too late, leading to a bravura action sequence that ends with shocking results (part of it was unfortunately spoiled in its promotional materials, which this critic watched after having seen the film. If you can avoid it, please do). 

Such a shift in aesthetics usually does not happen when it follows up a commercially viable movie. You don’t want to subvert what you visually laid out in front of the audience first. The movie’s visual look should theoretically have been the same as the first. However, Finn and cinematographer Charlie Sarroff immediately grab our attention by not doing what the first film did, even if the cold open wraps up this story. Right after this thrilling shift in tone and style, we meet our protagonist, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), whom we learn, by way of a Drew Barrymore interview, that she has recently recovered from a car accident that left her severely injured and killed her boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson). 

Her pre-accident life was plagued by a series of controversies, all involving her highly publicized drug and alcohol use, which not only caused the death of her boyfriend in an accident but alienated her relationship with her mother/manager, Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt) and best friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula).

We meet her on the cusp of beginning a new world tour, a redemption arc of sorts in which she crawled back from the literal and figurative depths of hell (Finn frequently, and briefly, jumps to Skye screaming in agony after the car crashes on multiple occasions) and has now been reborn as a woman freed from the shackles of addiction. Well, she has been secretly using Vicodin for her back pain, which she gets from a drug dealer named Lewis (Lukas Gage). Unbeknownst to Skye, that individual was there when Joel attempted to pass on the curse to someone and is now afflicted by the Smile Entity, causing him to commit suicide and pass the curse on to her. 

While the opening scene primed us for a stylistically and thematically divergent installment from the original, it’s in the scene where Lewis is scared of something Skye is not seeing that Smile 2 begins to take shape. Quick overhead pans to represent the invisible entity immediately jolt us out of our seats as Skye begins to experience pure panic and terror, which gets visualized by the time Lewis repeatedly hits himself in the face with an iron plate until he’s completely disfigured, with only his smile remaining. 

From there, Finn smartly repurposes the story of the Smile Entity into the story of a recovered pop star whose public image’s preservation is now of the utmost importance. The camera erratically follows Skye on this nightmarish journey with impeccable verve. There’s actual movement in how it operates as an anchor of Skye’s tormented mind, which grows darker as she constantly pulls out her hair and can’t discern what’s real and a figment of the Entity playing tricks on her mind. 

Perhaps it gets too overcomplicated near its end, especially when it attempts to pull off a twist akin to Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Confession. But there’s a sense of playfulness here that Finn didn’t operate with at all in the original, which makes this switch all the more endearing and, dare I say, fun. The self-serious nature of the 2022 film sank any dramatic beat into comedic territory, and I bet it was unintentional. Here, Finn understands that such a difficult and arbitrary concept like the Smile Entity can be fun and draw sequences that rely on the star’s comedic timing and prowess. 

One such recurring bit of comedy involves inserts of Voss water every time Skye has to drink something. What could’ve otherwise been an egregious bout of product placement gets turned into a character in its own right, with the camera constantly lingering on those large glass Voss bottles so we can, yes, see the brand clearly but also twist its significance for the viewer. She has access to such water because her lifestyle permits it. But how she juggles down bottles of Voss as if it’s an alcoholic beverage perverts the purity that the clear glass bottle is known for. It also becomes a bit since every refrigerator is filled with Voss water and eventually becomes part of Skye’s discernment between dreams and reality. 

It’s possibly the most ingenious way to use a mandated product ever since Michael Bay rendered Bud Light the most patriotic drink imaginable by having Mark Wahlberg drink it behind an American flag in Transformers: Age of Extinction. The gratuitous extreme close-ups of Voss bottles or the placement of its refrigerators (filled with Voss) inside the frame instill laughter as soon as the audience spots it within the frame and transcends a mere advertisement that could’ve otherwise brought down the sequel’s thrills. 

I wouldn’t qualify Smile 2 as scary, per se, although Finn, this time around, does have a few effective ‘gotcha!’ moments that even yours truly did not see coming (including one where a cellphone is used to mislead viewers). However, how they are shot and tightly edited is so inspiring that it doesn’t take long to entirely suspend our disbelief and embark on the journey with him. There’s a pace and timing that Finn never breaks away from, and we slowly buy into Skye’s psychological torment, no matter how gnarly and confusing it can get. With visuals always in service of the atmosphere it attempts to establish, the film never wastes a dull moment in making you care about the film’s protagonist, even if she constantly makes terrible decisions for herself and the people around her. The ending in and of itself is an even more sickening conclusion to how the Smile Entity operates, though one will refrain from revealing it here to ensure you can enjoy it to its fullest extent. 

As Skye, Naomi Scott delivers the best performance of her career, unfortunately plagued by dud after dud. To be honest, she never entirely had the chance to shine in any of the films she was previously cast in, from the disastrous 2017 reboot of Power Rangers to Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, to date his only genuinely lousy film. In Smile 2, she completely transforms herself into the persona of a recovering pop star who, on the surface, appears calm and in control of her life after years of battling addiction but hides a much darker secret that the Entity slowly releases. 

Of course, the recovering addict framing device ensures that her mother thinks she has begun using again when she slowly loses her mind from the Entity. The predictable beats are there but quickly subverted when Skye further descends into madness. The shift is stark and thrillingly conveyed, with stark close-ups of Skye’s face that brilliantly demonstrate the extent of her nightmare as the visions become more real and frightening. One could say Smile 2 acts as a redemption of sorts for Scott, who was always poised to be a massive star ever since Lemonade Mouth was released but never had the chance to showcase her talents with the projects she ultimately chose fully. 

In this case, however, the film wouldn’t have worked if Scott’s performance hadn’t been good. She works with a fine line between genuine, unflinching horror and dark comedy that makes this fictitious pop star enthralling and acts as a somewhat excellent companion to Saleka’s turn as Lady Raven in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap. The difference between Scott and Bacon is night and day, alongside an astute sense of style that accompanies this performance brilliantly. 

As a result, it’s hard not to be swayed by Smile 2. The marketing campaign was ingenious, but I was more skeptical that this would be worth watching, especially considering how bad the first one was. However, the film is not only terrific, it may very well be the best mainstream horror movie of the year. This year’s independent sphere has viscerally scared me in ways that I never imagined, including Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms and, most recently, Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour. However, mainstream horror has done very little for me at the cinema this year, with plenty of forgettable and jumpscare-heavy films plaguing our screens. 

With Smile 2, Parker Finn not only reinvents the mythology of its Entity in a stylistically captivating way but finally gives Naomi Scott a true chance to shine in the spotlight as a movie star. Here’s hoping his next film will be even wilder than this, whether by way of another Smile installment or something else entirely.

Smile 2 will be released globally in theaters on October 18, 2024.