Parker Finn’s Smile (2022) was an unlikely hit that conjoined familiar horror riffs about possession and contagion with a sharp understanding of how uncanny the act of smiling can be. Usually a signifier of happiness or joy, the smile can just as easily be utterly disturbing when shorn of context or reason—or if it is in the wrong context or for the wrong reason. Instead of turning that frown upside down, Finn has his possessed characters smile in a manner that was too big, too still, and lacking in any discernible purpose. That would seem to be a limited horror idea and one that the first film would have surely exhausted, and to an extent that is true. Smile 2, however, works precisely because Finn, who again wrote and directed, takes the ideas from the first film and uses them to explore completely different characters inhabiting a completely different world.

In the first film, the protagonist was an emotionally damaged psychologist, which was the perfect character to struggle with the idea of being cursed because her natural inclination, as with all doctors and scientists in the horror genre, is to find a rational explanation. This time, Finn centers the story on Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a Taylor Swift-level international pop star who is just emerging into the public limelight after a year of recovery from a mysterious car accident and a longstanding addiction to alcohol and drugs. Like Rose, the protagonist in the first film, Skye is a deeply damaged soul, but the difference here is that Skye does not inhabit a normal world of ordinary people and routines. Rather, she lives in the pop-culture stratosphere, her life dictated and run by agents, assistants, and a grueling schedule that demands that she always be “on.” She is a performer in her own life, and the stress of playing the role of pop star to everyone’s delight is deeply complicated when she is cursed by a malevolent supernatural force that passes from person to person via visual trauma. As we learned in the first film, the force possesses someone and drives that person mad, at which point they kill themselves in some grisly manner in front of someone else, who then becomes cursed with the force. Skye becomes the recipient when, in a moment of weakness, she visits a drug dealer (Lukas Gage) to get some Vicodin to deal with her persistent back pain, only to bear witness to him smashing himself to death with a metal barbell plate.

The cursed person begins seeing others around them as malevolently grinning threats, which is even worse for Skye because she is literally surrounded by people—strangers—all the time, most of whom know who she is and try to get her attention. And when a deranged fan tries to attack her, it is unclear whether the danger is real or all in her mind. Her controlling mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), who also acts as her manager, is no help because she has been through the wringer of addiction and violence with Skye already, which makes all of her paranoia and desperation seem like a relapse. Skye reachs out to her friend, Gemma (Dylan Gelula), with whom she had a falling out a year earlier, but there is only so much she can do. For the most part, Skye is isolated in her terror, which becomes the film’s primary strength. Finn shows how she can be completely surrounded by other people all the time, and yet be totally and completely alone. Skye’s true horror is her isolation because everyone sees her as either a star or a source of income; she has long since stopped being a person, even in her own mind, which makes her immensely vulnerable.

As with almost all sequels, Smile 2 wants to outdo its predecessor, and in many ways, Finn is successful in surpassing the first film, which itself was an expansion of ideas he first explored in his 2020 short film Laura Hasn’t Slept, which won a Special Jury Award at South by Southwest. There are plenty of jump scares, most of which are earned with careful setup and an enveloping sound design that keeps us constantly on edge (returning composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s expressionistic score does a lot of heaby lifying, as well). Finn also pours on the sadistic gore, some of which really works, but at other times feels like too much; he is so good at setting up horrific ideas that he often doesn’t need to drive home the gory money shot, although he always does anyway. He also pushes the aesthetic envelop, especially in the bravura, one-shot opening sequence that briefly reunites us with the first film’s surviving character, Joel (Kyle Gallner), who enacts a desperate and doomed plan to end the curse.

Even more so than the first film, Smile 2 is a cinematic version of Russian nesting dolls, with scene after scene initially appearing to be a part of reality, but ultimately being revealed as something transpiring in Skye’s increasingly warped mind. Finn complicates that even further by breaking from the present from time to time to show us fragments of Skye’s past, namely bits and pieces of the horrible car accident that killed her actor boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson), and gave her all those scars that snake down her torso. Finn plays with our perception, giving us images that may be present real, may be past real, or may be just curse-inflicted nightmares. By the end of the film, you may be feeling that he has nested one too many plotlines into his contraption, but it works so well that it is hard to begrudge him the challenge.

Copyright © 2025 James Kendrick

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