Smile 2
The shapeshifting demon of Smile and its new sequel, Smile 2, is a special kind of evil: It doesn’t just feast on the distress of its triggered victims, it meets that feeling with a mocking grin. Parker Finn’s ruthlessly nerve-jangling horror sleeper introduced this unholy monster– 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 famous as Ariana Grande. 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. It’s a particularly 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 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 boyfriend, which Finn shows us via horrific nightmare flashbacks. On top of her injuries and newfound sobriety, Skye has to contend with a pushy stage mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), 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 makes us as viewers 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 Chappell 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 joke of the first movie was at the expense of a whole slew of therapeutically metaphorical film-festival favorites, all insistent that the real monster is trauma. Smile made that 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 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 has plenty of jolts, including one quick cutaway to an appalling act of self-inflicted violence whose abruptness recalls a split-second moment from one of Finn’s plainest influences (and one of my all time favorites), 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 condo, slipping into a new funny-creepy interpretative pose every time she looks away. It plays like a hellish game of red light green light.
Smile 2 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 a live action take on Satoshi Kon’s landmark psychodramatic anime, Perfect Blue. Scott, who’s a musician herself (she performs the movie’s 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. The movie really doesn’t work without her. She’s brilliant.
Is the actress channeling her own experiences in the belly of the Hollywood beast? We’ve had plenty of films focus on the downside of fame, reaching all the way back to classic Hollywood. What’s changed in the intervening years is our parasocial relationship to celebrity – a subject broached by an ending no less wickedly satisfying for how inevitable it becomes. It’s a terrific ending. One you’ll find it hard not to smile at…if you can bear to look at the screen.
