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Smile 2 is smarter scarier and much better than the first movie
Oct
Smile 2 is smarter scarier and much better than the first movie
The original Smile felt like a miracle when it was released in 2022: a well-crafted, decidedly solid horror movie plucked. From the obscure hell of direct-to-streaming release and turned into a genuine box-office hit. But for all its commercial success, Smile could never escape the fact that it started life as an excellent short film. That got stretched to feature length. The full-length movie has a few good scares, but it’s more a promise of something great than it is great on its own. For the sequel, writer-director Parker Finn makes good on every bit of that promise. Smile 2 is bigger, scarier, funnier, smarter, darker, and undeniably better than its predecessor.
Using the world of a pop superstar is a perfect step forward for Smile’s creepy premise, but it also feels like a bit of metatextual playfulness from Finn. It’s an acknowledgement that his franchise has hit the big time. He can upgrade from the first movie’s anonymous main character to someone who sells out (fictional) arenas. And Skye really is the selling point in Smile 2. Finn’s script builds out a nuanced, interesting version of a pop star, someone far enough removed from real-life signifiers to feel like a fully realized charactet. Instead of a cheap shot at any particular real-life singer.
Finn admirably writes Skye as someone removed from the normal walks of life. She has concerns we can recognize, about her career and her friends, but Finn never tries to imbue her weariness of fame with synthetic relatability. She feels like a balancing act verging on a magic trick. We can sympathize with her because Scott gives an incredibly grounded and human performance, but Finn never asks us to relate too closely to her. We’re witnessing her story, not imprinting ourselves onto it.
Part of this is thanks to the details the film weaves in about Skye’s past. We learn all the ways she’s hurt the people around her long before the grinning apparitions appeared. We see the ways she tries to cope, and hear about tricks her therapist has given her. One particularly effective flashback even lets us know just how dark things got for Skye before the movie even began.
Letting us in on these finer points of Skye’s life also lets Finn create a more fully realized narrative around her. Where the first film felt like a few good ideas for scares with a ramshackle plot. And blank characters merely designed to connect them, Smile 2’s focus on Skye and her story lets the horror flow naturally out of that pursuit. And boy, does it ever. The plot specificity doesn’t pin Finn into less interesting scares. Instead it fuels his creativity, letting him create more elaborate and creepier set pieces than anything in the original.
Smile 2 features a few fantastic moments of fright set in crowded arenas, but Finn finds all the movie’s best terror in Skye’s lavish apartment. He turns the gorgeous straight lines and the 90-degree angles of penthouse hallways. Into an endlessly shifting maze of corners for smiling visions to lurk behind. Providing some of the most inventive and enjoyable jump scares of any movie this year. It’s the perfect embodiment of a balance between creepy and silly, a balance Finn manages to find again and again, to tremendous effect each time.
More importantly, though, occasional silliness aside, Smile 2 is also genuinely funny. Humor was sorely missed in the first movie, which is too often borderline stodgy by comparison with its grinning monsters. Smile 2, on the other hand, recognizes that a certain degree of humor is essential to us buying into the bleak world of a haunted superstar. It’s yet another example of Finn letting his narrative and main character shape the movie’s vibe. Rather than the other way around.
This character-first storytelling approach is present everywhere in the film, but it’s crucially effective in Smile 2’s hallucination sequences. As with the first film, once the Smile curse has infected a victim, it causes them to see a distorted version of reality. The original movie uses that dynamic to present one version of events, then pull the rug out to shock us with another. Whether it’s a character with a threatening grin who was never really there, or our hero stabbing an attacker. Only to realize they’ve accidentally attacked a friend.
We never really knew enough about protagonist Rose (Sosie Bacon) to know. What it means to see things through her eyes. Or to know what specific insecurities the curse was trying to feed in these visions. That decidedly isn’t the case in the sequel.
Each of Skye’s hallucinations centers tightly on a specific person or group she’s scared to let down. Because they all focus on different people in her life, each of these scenes has a unique build. Finn lets the tension mount organically until it tips over into horrifying unreality. Like the late-movie confrontation that feels like a perfectly normal screaming match, until it suddenly goes a step too far. This gives every vision a distinct flavor, turning each one into a demented guessing game for the audience.
