It looks like the era of the shitty horror sequel might finally be coming to a close, what with Terrifier 3 finding an even larger audience than its predecessor (it’s pretty silly that it’s also the fourth movie in that franchise, but whatever) and Parker Finn’s Smile 2, which takes the concept from the first installment and perfects it into a Tower of Terror freefall experience. Unlike most cash-grab sequels, both of these feel like passion projects — in the case of the former, Damien Leone still has ways to mutilate a human body that he wants to explore on screen, and in the latter, Finn knows his concept has legs and wants to explore them further. They’re also examples of properly-checked ambition, with little of the self-indulgence that comes with higher budgets and fewer checks on their vision.
One could say that they’re also the marketplace correcting itself, with the boutique, austere versions of “elevated” horror having finally frustrated enough of the audience that they’re willing to seek out studio films that fulfill their promises, but who knows if that’s true – as any used car salesman trying to offload some lemons knows, there’s still plenty of marketing strategies left to try and new customers born every minute. When paired with Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, you could call these movies “maximalist” horror, each of which is viscerally and viciously entertaining as a direct counterpoint to the po-faced horseshit we get from the regrettably mid. What makes Smile 2 special is that it’s from a major studio, where horror sequels typically go to die, and how it thrives anyway.
Given that Finn plunges you directly into the aftermath of the first film – its prologue takes place six days after that one’s fiery end – let’s go over what exactly makes a Smile movie bare its teeth. There’s a demon out there, most accurately imagined as a “soul parasite,” which infects a person after they watch its previous host commit suicide. The trademark grin is a sign that the metaphysical monster has total control over its host, and it’s what they’ll wear even as they do some terrible shit to themselves. The newly infected will be upset, of course, but then they’ll start to have some strange hallucinations: They’ll start seeing the dead person haunting them as an apparition, with that same smile on their face, and soon that look will spread to other people from their psychic landscape – friends, family, passerby – and the visions will only get worse as it approaches the end of its lifecycle, one week after they witnessed the prior host die. Then, it’s all about finding a new host and continuing the circle of death so that this demon has a decent amount of food in its metaphorical belly. If you haven’t seen the first one, you can probably imagine what it was like — a traumatized person gets cursed, tries to beat the demon and the trauma simultaneously, fails at the former, dies, spreads the demon, and provides us with our set-up for a much better sequel.
Our lead this time is Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a pop star who is entering into her “post-rehab comeback” era following a car accident that left her previous boyfriend dead and her with some scars that she despises. Oh, and back pain — lots of back pain, for which she can only receive Tylenol, given her history with substance abuse. She’s about to have the first major show of her comeback tour at the off-brand Madison Square Garden, and she’s cracking under the pain and the pressure. She decides she needs to take the edge off – there’s so much at stake that hewing perfectly to sobriety really isn’t an option — and texts her old dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) to hit him up for some Vicodin. He responds with happy emojis, which makes it pretty fucking surprising that he pulls her in and holds a katana to her throat in a fit of drug-induced madness. See, Lewis saw some shit a week back at a drug dealer’s house, and now he’s having all of these strange visions – he doesn’t believe she’s real in the first place, and he only relaxes when she proves that she is, in fact, in front of him. Instead of running away, she decides to stick around – it’s clear Lewis is in a bad way, and she still wants some pain relief – and watches in horror as he seems to OD in front of her.
It’s when he stands up, smiling, grabs a weight from his home gym, and proceeds to bash his face in that she realizes that something truly fucking bizarre is happening. She debates calling the cops, but she is worried they’ll tie it all back to her and ruin everything that she and her mom (Rosemarie DeWitt) have worked so hard for. So, she splits, and though this sounds like the kind of moral failing that would normally condemn a horror protagonist to their death, the damage has already been done. Besides, her original sin is much further back in her personal history, and her substance abuse issues have mainly been an expression of her grief and guilt. She alienated her best friend, Gemma (Dylan Gelula), and now has to turn to her for support when she starts seeing some weird shit. For instance, Lewis. He’s dead, right? So, why is he behind her, wearing that creepy grin, with his face all smashed in? Why is she getting texts from an anonymous number asking her where she was the other night? And why the hell is everybody smiling? What follows is a two-hour descent into madness, full of gross-out gore and genuinely cringe-worthy moments, often as bitingly funny as they are brutal.
Finn is a rare breed of horror director, one who successfully lifts the aesthetic contributions of the “elevated” and applies them to fundamentally audience-friendly studio horror without pretension or compromise. There’s little that separates the Smile movies from their Blumhouse-type ilk before you head into the theater – in fact, I spent the better part of a month confusing the first one with Truth or Dare, which had its possessed teenagers sport similarly creepy grins before they did whatever dumb shit they were told to – but once you’re in there, you start to notice just how astonishingly competent Finn is at crafting complex and elegant scares, deeply rooted in the psychologies of his leads. For example, outside of the usual suspects (her dead drug dealer, her dead boyfriend, and so on), the “Smile” demon appears to Skye in various anonymous forms that would be well-known to a pop star of her caliber. There’s a creepy young fan who can’t stop staring at her during a signing, a stalker with diseased skin who strips to the nude in her apartment, and, most impressively, a troupe of backup dancers who pursue her like if a truly nightmarish West Side Story gang decided to branch out into B&Es. There are some recognizable gene markers in its cinematic DNA, like Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Aronofsky’s Black Swan, and Noe’s Climax, to name a few, and their influences are well-felt. Still, Finn never leans on them like other directors do – it’s hard to imagine him saying it’s “Josie and the Pussycats for perverts” or whatever.
The egoless application of style means that Finn still has the brain power to devote himself to other things beyond aesthetics, and he thankfully chose to focus on making this movie as entertaining as a mid-October release should be. The kills are wonderfully gnarly, with a special shout-out going to the beautifully executed first ten minutes, in which we see the film’s logo presented to us in the funniest possible fashion after a lengthy tracking shot (another example of his restraint – his storytelling is so compelling that it takes a decent amount of time to notice how he’s doing it). Its tone is considerably lighter than the first film, given that he’s shed the trauma trappings that made mainstream horror so fucking boring over the last decade, and he’s able to sink his teeth into a protagonist who is vastly more complex than the one in the first Smile, played to perfection by Scott. Acting in films like these is often a very thankless job – you’re always playing at your most keyed-up, under pounds of VFX make-up, all while you’re prepping to feign fright on cue – and Scott never loses sight of her character’s core even as she goes crazy from the demon’s influence. We get glimpses of what made her a compelling part of her world’s pop culture in the easy way she interacts with fans and her dedication to her craft, making her sympathetic enough for us to be surprised when it’s revealed that the emphasis in “survivor’s guilt” should be placed firmly on the guilt when speaking of her.
Smile 2 ends with what might be the best possible sequel set-up seen on-screen in some time, with endless possibilities for where a third installment might go should Finn decide to stay the course with the franchise as a part of his first-look deal at Paramount. I’ll be real with you: I hope he makes fifty of these if he wants to. Now that he’s gotten all of the “rules” out of the way in the first movie, he’s able to tell genuinely interesting and creepy-as-hell tales in this world without having to conform rigorously to the genre’s rules – vital concessions in getting the first film to screen, both exposition-and-subject-wise, which no longer apply after it made shitloads of money.
Smile 2 is the best-case scenario for a horror sequel. It brings out the best in the concept while leaving its predecessor’s worst aspects well in the past, adding layers of complexity and refining its style without sacrificing any entertainment value. It’s just the kind of thing that will have you grinning ear-to-ear on the walk to the lobby.