Like The Substance, Smile 2 is as much a horror film as it is an artifact of our chronically online pop obsessed zeitgeist. The film is just as fascinated with how demon brain parasites mutate a mind inducing paranoia, as it is showing us how pop stardom and toxic fan meet and greets do the same exact thing. This dynamic allows the film to offer up a less than sympathetic protagonist in a recovering 365 party girl, on her post rehab, pre-tour press run. Her party ended in a drug fueled car crash that killed her actor boyfriend, scarred her body and put her in celebrity time out. While some folks may love a comeback, if TikTok has taught me anything, everyone loves a public celebrity crash out even more. That is what Smile 2 offers up in heaping amounts along with Terrifier level gore in moderate doses.
We meet up with our pop starlet Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) a year sober, and a few weeks before her big comeback tour, she’s rehearsing her choreography onstage when she gets a ping in the back from the accident. She needs vicodin, but thanks to her previous substance abuse issues, she has to hit up an old high school drug dealer – who just so happens to be infected with the entity from the first film. From there it goes about how’d you expect, one public meltdown after another, destroying her fragile media persona, while everyone around her thinks she’s just your typical over dramatic celebrity relapsing, when in fact she is battling a demonic brain parasite. Also given how we discern she treated those around her before rebab, we get that she was a rather insufferable startlett before this thing, who probably wasn’t much different before she had the brain parasite.
The first Smile was fine, but it was very derivative and more concerned with jump scares than really trying to say anything. Here however, there’s a few things going on under the hood as her reality begins to crumble around her, reducing her to nothing before our eyes. The fickleness of fame, the dangers of addiction, how our society’s outlandish beauty standards impact women and the perils of celebrity, are all things the film touches on as we fall down this surreal rabbit hole. The further down we get, the more the camp begins to amp up (background dancer attack sequence, hello?) as the ending has our protagonist going full on crash out, stealing cars and playing GTA6 IRL. Think bald Britney mixed with Martin Lawrence in 1999. While we do get some actual lore this time around given the runtime, it still leaves a bit to be desired as to where this entity came from.
Smile 2 was an unexpected surprise. Writer/Director Parker Finn really tried to do something unique with the material and it paid off. Not all protagonists have to be sympathetic and sometimes it’s really fun to watch terrible things happen to horrible people, something highlighted by the opening shootout in a trap house. This film also has some intriguing things to say about celebrity as well as how that kind of power can do terrible things to people, which is why we’re let off the trauma hook this time around and can enjoy watching Skye go through the ringer. If Smile has taught me one thing, it’s that not all horror franchises have to be a serialized story and sometimes that’s a better thing. It also really makes the franchise about the overarching thematic question of what is this thing after? What is it trying to accomplish?
All I do know is after this it just gets a whole lot more interesting.
