Do you remember when the Smile trailer gave away the best scare of the movie? The driver side window moment! I watched Smile with a bunch of mates who hadn’t seen it, and they jumped through their skivvies, while I knew it was coming and braced myself 😬 So screw trailers, is my overall sentiment, and their ability to ruin the experience through advertising. I have refused to watch the Smile 2 trailer at every turn to the best of my ability, but it didn’t stop Village Cinemas posting a mosaic of all the visions seen in Smile 2 on their social medias 🤦♂️ Yet I’ll be the one to say it out loud – I loved Smile. Smile, to me, is the most effective horror movie I’ve seen since Hereditary, keeping my brain alert to danger when I’m trying to get to sleep. It may be formulaic, but it’s also crafted to be chilling, while containing genuine jump scares, and intelligently investigating trauma and our responses. I’m in complete support of a Smile 2, and reviews have been good 👍 So scare me out of my wits! Who needs sleep anyway?
Pop singer Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is returning to the stage after a round of rehab, and a brutal car accident that killed a fellow celebrity, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson), and injured her spine. She is coping the best she can, but with rehearsals and her ongoing routine, some Vicodin would surely help! So Skye bunks off secretly to visit an old school friend for the old drug hookup. But poor Lewis (Lukas Gage) is acting really weird, and presumably coked out of his mind before he starts smiling with that sinister stare, and ends his own life for Skye to see. The smile demon has been transferred, and Skye has a week of hell ahead of her, and no more, unless she gets lucky 😀😀😀 Hello, freak bitches – writer/director Parker Finn is going for it again.
Well, boo-hoo, I’m not into it, and let me explain why. I didn’t expect Smile 2 to still be so formulaic as the first; slow, and relying on the same jumpy setups as before. It’s Smile 2, and it’s time to decide what parts of the original can be shedded, and what must carry over as staples for the franchise. And from the first movie, it seemed to me that the Smile entity attacks and intensifies a person’s living traumas, to the point where they very well might submit to thoughts of killing themselves even if the Smile monster wasn’t going to force their hand anyway. In the first movie, the lead is self-medicating through being a workaholic, and this movie seems to plot a course exploring drugs as a crutch, but doesn’t take that path. I mean, it’s all set up for it; all Skye needs to do is snort that booger-sugar in Lewis’s rumpus room and we are away! But she doesn’t ☹ Talk to Me was a nice allegory concerning the potential spiral of drug addiction, and I guess that movie will have to stand alone in tackling the topic through horror for the time being ☹ But by making Smile 2’s lead a pop star with a lot of public appearances, the Smile demon surely has a packed playground of ways to make Skye flip her lid, and I’m not suggesting the movie doesn’t do its dues – I like the little girl that constantly stares at Skye, dismissed as an outrageous fan. And it was smart of the demon to use the grubby creepo as a vision to make Skye think there was a home invasion. But Skye is not a victim! She’s not a victim of herself. And that’s a real downer for me in connecting with the character.
Moreover, and perhaps I’m nitpicking now, but there’s no reason why Skye would need to see visions of Lewis so often as she does, when it’s quite clearly Paul who she feels guilty about. The monster does eventually show Paul to help Skye knock over that little old lady, but I still feel like this movie is ultimately scattered on Skye’s problems. The hairpulling is a symptom. The potential in her team mistrusting her sanity is a symptom. If the movie doesn’t want drugs to be the cause, then what is it? The movie briefly touches on Skye’s relationship with her mother, but she’s not too pushy or horrible as a manager in the world of show biz, so it’s not that either. Is it the car accident? Is it how Skye is prone to violent outbursts? By the end of the movie, the answer just seems to be that Skye is in general opposition to herself, and it’s very vague compared to the underlying context that worked so well in the original. I don’t like it.
But maybe, well, I wanted the house build before the bricks were laid. The movie is aware of how it wants to mix its ingredients, and I just wanted them presented sooner. I called bullshit right away on Morris (Peter Jacobson) ever tracking down Lewis to warn him about the Smile entity – Smile 2’s amazing frenetic opening sequence, not only gave Joel (Kyle Gallner) a heightened outro to sink his teeth into, to depart from this franchise with a salute, but made it so it would near impossible for anyone to trace the Smile trail back behind them, since it was passed onto Lewis as a consequence of secret and shady dealings. And the movie eventually backs me up – Morris was never real, and I did think Peter Jacobson had fallen a long way from being a plastic surgeon in House, to Frankensteining a possessed women in an abandoned Pizza Hut freezer 🤓 In fact, everything beyond the smiley flash dance possie, creeping around Skye’s hotel room like Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels, steps on the gas and rachets up the intensity for a third act of thrills! When Skye realises that she has killed her mother 😮 Woah! (Although Talk to Me did that too, and I was also certain that this would be a vision, because it’s so brutal, while the movie takes a long time confirming it). I figured that ending was coming too – the entity must’ve felt like it had struck gold when it found itself inside a famous person, with a large reach to the masses. And therein, provides a finale opportunity too juicy for the entity, or movie, to pass up. Why, what’s going to happen next? A psycho vision phenomenon?! Spare a thought for all the parents whose preteen daughters are major Skye Riley fans 😩
I still feel like this movie should’ve really focused in on Skye’s mental health to help me care for her more, but I suppose there could be something said about the entity having to sift through its host’s brain to find the true root of trauma to expose. Maybe the entity takes six days to kill its victim, not to savour turning the host insane, but because it takes that long for the entity to read all the way through the subconscious – but that’s just an interpretation. That’s why the entity is throwing Lewis, and Gemma (Dylan Gelula), and Paul, at Skye, as they occur to her, before settling on Skye’s inner thoughts of herself, to secure the final blow 😈 So here I am, with Smile 2, my last review of the year, having gone full circle round the mulberry bush, questioning decisions, but ultimately enjoying my ride on the haunted rollercoaster. Could we argue that the Smile franchise is the new ‘Nightmare on Elm Street, where nothing is real, and visions will kill you? If so, I’ll take it 👍 Smile 2: it’s better than The Substance, where both send their superstars down a deep dark spiral. Smile 2: is it better than Longlegs? Now that’s a debate worth having. Where I’d write, they both stay true to their form and thrill in all the right places, whilst a little scruffy in their storytelling to manage perfection.
4.0
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