Chris Duncan
The Smile smile is very distinct: a “smiling” figure might stand far away from the camera, but the expression’s unsettling nature will be tangible, even (or maybe especially) in darkness. Up close, the Smile smile is malicious and uncanny; no normal person smiles like that! The original Smile leveraged this expression as the film’s primary monster to relative success. The original is tense and atmospheric enough to compensate for its nondescript setting, characters, and general mean-spiritedness, but the premise is so versatile that it feels like missed potential. One leaves that film thinking there has got to be more that writer-director Parker Finn can do with the idea.
Enter Smile 2. The victim this time is popstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a troubled star who is returning to the spotlight some time after a car accident that killed her actor boyfriend (Ray Nicholson, with a small role that might come off to some as a strange impression of his father) and left her scarred. She’s struggling with her newfound sobriety, but one night, she relents and goes to her friendly drug dealer’s apartment. Little does she know, said drug dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage) is at the end of his rope at the hands of the smile monster (I don’t think there is a name for this thing yet, although characters in the movie refer to it as a “cosmic being” of some kind). In a grizzly scene similar to the opening of the original Smile, Riley witnesses Lewis get possessed by the entity and smash his own face in with a weight. Per the rules of Smile, the privilege of hosting the entity is passed onto Skye herself.
Skye is haunted by the smiling entity as she prepares for her first big comeback show. Like the original, the monster appears in disguise–among others, as a little girl at a meet & greet, as her assistant, and sometimes as multiple people. Sometimes the monster might appear just to menace her, sometimes it might try to make her look bad to others, and sometimes it might just show up to hit her a couple times. It’s all relatively straightforward–we watch Riley encounter the monster in escalating situations and increasingly lose her grip on reality as her time runs out.
There is a certain expectation with horror sequels. The atmosphere and scares will level up in a way, or that new ideas and concepts might introduce themselves. Smile 2 definitely has new ideas, and for the sake of the film experience, I won’t divulge much about them. Such is to say that Finn does have some neat tricks up his sleeve, even if he does not really remix the formula of the original in any significant ways.
These unsettling visits from the sneering ghosts don’t really lead to anything except, assumedly, the moment when the monster is supposed to possess and kill Skye herself. In this sense, Smile 2 runs into the same frustrations that plague similar horror sequels–if we already know the rules of the “game,” watching someone learn them isn’t interesting. Similarly, if the protagonist doesn’t know the rules of the game yet, watching them flail about trying to understand what’s going on inspires little but frustration. Smile 2 doesn’t dwell much on Skye trying to understand the monster and its process, but it does insert a kind of Deus-ex-machina style intervention from an outside party (Morris, played by Peter Jacobson) to explain the entity and its mechanics. It’s a very awkward piece of exposition in the film, and Morris’ role is otherwise quite small and inconsequential.
The original Smile, of course, talked a lot about trauma, and the monster loved to feed on the protagonist’s own psychological baggage to further ruin her life. Smile 2 is no different. Here, Riley’s struggle with maintaining sobriety, her guilt at the death of her boyfriend, and her fraught relationship with people like her mom/manager (Rosemarie DeWitt) and longtime friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula) are all fodder for the smiling apparitions to exploit. Perhaps in an act of self-consciousness, the word “trauma” is not used quite as heavily in this sequel and the monster’s exploits are targeted at things like Skye’s insecurities and intrusive thoughts.
Just as Smile treated its trauma metaphor with a lack of tact, so too does Smile 2 cover Skye Riley’s descent with a mean spirit. I don’t want to insinuate that the films owe anything at all to their audience, even those dealing with similar problems as Riley, but those people are not going to leave the theater feeling good about themselves.
Horror movies are, of course, not meant to be “pleasant” per se—look at the relative success of Terrifier, the latest of which one of our critics called an “endurance test.” Furthermore, films with similar themes, like Hereditary, also treat traumatic experiences and their consequences with relatively static determinism. But one might also look to a film like The Babadook, similarly harrowing and unpleasant, but also notable for how its final message is actually quite empowering and mature. That film’s optimism is key to its success, and is a large part of what makes it a revered modern horror classic. With Smile, the film’s mean-spiritedness felt less like a feature of the film than the horror genre writ large. With Smile 2, it cemented itself as a key part of the franchise formula. If that’s what we can come to expect from this franchise, fun as they may be, I might skip the next one.
