The shapeshifting demon of Smile and its new sequel, Smile 2, is like an internet edgelord of evil: It doesn’t just feast on the distress of its triggered victims, it meets that feeling with a mocking grin, an IRL emoji of “u scared bro?” malevolence. Parker Finn’s ruthlessly nerve-jangling horror sleeper introduced this unholy troll – a trickster phantom that terminates its host via grisly, involuntary suicide and then passes, virus-style, to any unlucky witnesses. Along the way, the monster takes various human forms, all sporting a shit-eating, ear-to-ear rictus. There’s something rather sarcastic about that expression, isn’t there? “Don’t worry, be happy,” it sneers in the face of mounting terror.
If you’ve ever felt pressure to turn a frown upside down for public appearances, you might see a little of yourself in these exaggerated smiles. Slightly less relatable, at least for most of us, are the emotional circumstances that Smile 2 catches in its funhouse mirror. After all, the cursed heroine of this gory, spirited second installment, also written and directed by Finn, happens to be a pop star as grande as Ariana. To her, that cruel Joker beam is the face of fame – of an industry machine demanding she always be on, of a paparazzi always saying “cheese,” of screaming fans tethering their own joy to hers. This time, the bogeyman is painting the grotesque downside of the showbiz dream pearly white. Talk about a resonant angle at the end of a summer ruled by Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Charli XCX.
The perfectly named Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) catches the self-harm hex after landing a front-row seat to her Vicodin dealer’s face-smashing makeout session with an iron weight. The monster hit the burdened-psyche jackpot with Skye. The star is still recovering from a nearly life- and career-ending car accident – a coked-up joy ride that killed her movie-star beau and which Finn shows us via horrific nightmare flashbacks arranged by ol’ Smiley. On top of her injuries and newfound sobriety, Skye has to contend with a pushy stage mother (Rosemarie DeWitt, now old enough to play parent to a thirtysomething – enough to spook any real thirtysomething who still thinks of her as the titular bride of Rachel Getting Married), a demanding record-label bigwig (Raúl Castillo), and her guilt about a friendship she torpedoed over that year of living narcotically. And of course there’s the pressure of a comeback tour kicking off in a matter of days.
The best moments in Smile 2 play off the specific stresses of music-biz stardom. There’s a great scene, barely supernatural in nature, where Skye – mouth smeared with blood-red lipstick – has to deliver some encouraging remarks at a charity event, and as the teleprompter freezes up, she launches into an uncomfortably honest, impromptu speech that would make the supposedly confessional Taylor Swift blush with secondhand embarrassment. Earlier, an encounter with a crazed stalker at a meet-and-greet hammers home the point that danger already comes with a smile when you have a chart-topper to your name. Watching the film, you might think of Amy Winehouse one minute (Skye’s mental and physical wellbeing is constantly prioritized below her obligations to the machine), the newly and uncomfortably famous Roan the next.
Finn keeps the horror on the edge of black comedy, mingling shocks with laughs, just as he did in the original. The larger joke of the first movie was at the expense of a whole movement of therapeutically metaphorical film-festival favorites, all insistent that the real monster is trauma. Smile made that shopworn notion rather literal, unleashing a creature that’s basically PTSD incarnate. But it also smirked at the comforting platitudes and happy endings of Babadook clones, arriving at the rather withering conclusion that we can’t really beat our demons. In other words, Finn made a mainstream, multiplex scream machine as merciless as its grinning ghoul, while also proving that there’s no reason that a horror movie that’s “really about trauma” can’t also be scary as hell.
Smile 2 isn’t as scary. It has plenty of jolts, including one quick cutaway to an appalling act of self-inflicted violence whose cruel abruptness recalls a split-second moment from one of Finn’s plainest influences, The Ring. And there’s one really inspired sequence that pits Skye against a troupe of phantom backup dancers mounting a synchronized pursuit across her swanky condo, slipping into a new funny-creepy interpretative pose every time she looks away. But the fright tactics do feel a little depleted, as though Finn had successfully wrung most of the dread from this premise already. Maybe the Cheshire Cat routine just loses its effectiveness after a dozen variations. Smile 2 also overindulges the villain’s hallucinatory, reality-bending abilities. When nothing we’re seeing can be trusted, when entire pages of plot amount to “it was all a nightmare,” it’s those of us in the audience who start to feel jerked around.
Again, the film only really strikes a chord – and builds on the more sustained emotional terrorism of its predecessor – when it’s keying into the anxiety of a life under the glow of the spotlight and flashbulbs, like some Blumhouse take on Satoshi Kon’s landmark psychodramatic anime, Perfect Blue. Scott, who’s a musician herself (she performs the movie’s serviceable Dua Lipa-ish club jams), is ferociously frazzled as Skye. It’s her first meaty big-screen performance after movie-star turns in lesser blockbuster fare like Disney’s live-action Aladdin and the Elizabeth Banks reboot of Charlie’s Angels, and Finn feeds off her emotiveness like a trauma parasite with a big appetite.
Is the actress channeling her own experiences in the belly of the Hollywood beast? She sings a golden oldie in Smile 2, the one about fame being a curse. What’s changed since that song was written is our parasocial relationship to celebrity – a subject broached by an ending no less wickedly satisfying for how inevitable it becomes. All but the most sensitive stans will find the corner of their own mouths curving up.