Despite the ongoing, post-pandemic instability of the theatrical experience, the horror genre remains a low-cost/high-reward investment for movie studios and independent producers eager, even desperate for commercial success. Hit on a modestly budgeted or even micro-budgeted horror entry and not only do the original investors eat well, a premise- or character-rich film offers the possibility of sequels, spin-offs, and eventually, prequels, remakes, and reboots once audiences have grown tired of or disinterested in a particular series. In short, a horror-based hit can lead to not just a series, but a lucrative, long-running franchise as well.
Easier said than done, of course, but when writer-director Parker Finn’s feature-length debut, Smile, premiered in the fall of 2022, genre-loving audiences responded enthusiastically. With an unmistakably healthy 12:1 ROI (return on investment), a sequel was greenlit almost immediately. Centered less on a specific character or group of characters and primarily on its human-haunting, trauma-feeding demon, Smile was – and remains – suited for the franchise treatment. Success or failure depended on whether the aptly named sequel, Smile 2 (no subtitle), would deliver on the combination of jump scares, existential dread, and bleak fatalism of the original, but add a few twists and turns of its own to guarantee a minimal sense of freshness, novelty, or originality.
Smile 2 does and doesn’t, treating its predecessor as a template or formula, including major emotional and plot beats, but spins them in a new direction by swapping out a hospital psychiatrist, Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), who faced – and lost – to her demons, imaginary and real, with a pop megastar, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), recovering from a history of substance and alcohol and a devastating car accident a year earlier that left her physically, emotionally, and mentally scarred and her actor boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray “son of Jack” Nicholson), dead at the bottom of a ravine.
Skye may be far from ready for the comeback tour pushed on her by her controlling, manipulative mother (and manager), Elizabeth Riley (Rosemarie DeWitt), or the senior record company executive, Darius (Raúl Castillo), funding her comeback, but from her perspective, she doesn’t have a viable choice. And that’s all before Skye, desperately in need of something stronger than over-the-counter pain meds, meets up with high school acquaintance turned drug dealer, Lewis Fregoli (Lukas Gage). Already haunted by the rictus grin-loving demon, Lewis dispatches himself in the goriest, gnarliest way possible as an already traumatized Skye watches in disbelief.
Skye, however, doesn’t immediately realize that she, like Lewis before her and countless others before Lewis, has been infected with the trauma-feeding demon. In less than a week, Skye will become the demon’s latest victim, fated like the others, to infect whoever witnesses her demise. As her already fragile mental state continues to deteriorate, everyone around her, invested less in Skye as a person than Skye as a brand, ignores the increasingly obvious warning signs. After all, even if it costs Skye her mental health or even her life, the show must go on, investors repaid, and profits made, placing Skye between two not-quite metaphorical forces, late-stage capitalism and a soul-destroying demon. Finn leaves it up to the audience to decide which one is worse, though to Skye and where Smile 2, already looking toward the next entry, ends up, it ultimately doesn’t matter.
With a substantially bigger budget, Finn goes all out, delivering a slick, visually engrossing film that could have easily stood on its own without the trauma-feeding demon (except, of course, metaphorically). Leaning heavily on Scott’s talents as a singer, dancer, and performer, Finn turns a potential liability (i.e., getting audience buy-in to Skye’s mega-success) into an asset. From the original songs performed by Scott-as-Skye to Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s (The White Lotus, Black Mirror, Utopia) dissonant, cacophonous score, ambient sound design that disconcertingly integrates itself into de Veer’s expansive score, and Lester Cohen’s (American Rust, Things Heard & Seen, The Looming Tower) ace-level production design (e.g., Skye’s cavernous Manhattan apartment and the recreation of Skye’s onstage performances), and it’s difficult, if not impossible, not to conclude the series has leveled up significantly.
Narratively, however, Smile 2 suffers from a problem typical of sequels, a sameness and predictability that comes with repetition. As with its predecessor, Finn favors playing the subjective/objective game story-wise, leaving the audience repeatedly guessing whether what they’re seeing and hearing onscreen is “real” within the world of the film, or a series of mental projections caused by Skye’s troubled, haunted mind. It’s unquestionably an enjoyable narrative game, but only up to a certain point. From there, diminishing returns begin to take over.
While that’s of little importance or effect here, it signals a potential problem for Finn and where he takes the next entry in the series: Once audiences have become intimately familiar with the narrative games you play if you consciously choose not to change them up, those diminishing returns start slipping into negative territory. Probably aware of the issue, Finn sends off Smile 2 on a deliberately perplexing, frustratingly open-ended note, one that hopefully he’s already figured out how to satisfactorily resolve when, as expected, studio executives green-light Smile 3 after the first weekend’s box-office returns have come in.
Smile 2 opens theatrically on Friday, October 18th, via Paramount Pictures.
