Warning: This post contains spoilers for Smile 2.

What’s worse: being infected by a sadistic demonic entity that feeds on the trauma of its victims or the crushing loneliness of a superstar?

In Smile 2Now in theaters, Naomi Scott delivers a performance alongside stars like Skye Riley, a global pop sensation about to embark on a new world tour and who finds herself in the hellish grip of both phenomena in the course of an endless nightmare of a week . Courtesy of M. Night Shyamalan FallIt’s not the first horror film of the year to delve into the discourse surrounding society’s obsession with pop prodigies, but it’s perhaps the most poignant attempt.

The horror sequel, from franchise writer-director Parker Finn, is released two years after its predecessor, Smilebecame a blockbuster breakthrough in the genre, earning over $217 million worldwide and becoming one of the biggest theatrical successes of 2022. The first film centers on Sosie Bacon’s Dr. committing suicide while smiling creepily at her. Naturally, it turns out that she has inherited a supernatural curse, embodied by a shape-shifting parasitic spirit that subjects its targets to extreme psychological torment for seven days before completely possessing them and forcing them to commit suicide in front of another person so that this can cling to a new host. It’s a premise clearly cut from the same chain properties as iconic horror entries like The ring And It follows– but tweaks the formula to include a maniacal grin.

Let’s put a smile on that face

This time, the demon sets out to cause suffering on a much larger scale by infecting Skye, one of the world’s most famous music acts. And boy, she has a lot of trauma to feed off. A year earlier, Skye’s former hard partying culminated in a horrific car accident that killed her actor boyfriend Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson, the son of master creepy smiler Jack Nicholson) and left her with a shattered leg and debilitating back injury. The crash was Skye’s lowest point, forcing her to sober up and try to cope with her all-consuming grief and guilt. Now she copes with her drug and alcohol cravings by chugging glass bottles of Voss water (an over-the-top product placement bit that somehow becomes an actual plot point) and trying not to pull out her hair which is already much shorter thanks to a despair-ridden shock necessitated by the Trichotillomania she has apparently developed since the accident.

When the film begins, Skye is on the verge of a career comeback. But it is clear that she is still in fear, both physically and mentally. With doctors unable to get a prescription for a painkiller due to her history of substance abuse, Skye turns to Lewis (Lukas Gage), a low-level drug dealer she knew in high school, to get the Vicodin she needs to sufficiently relieve her back pain. perform at her best.

Unfortunately, Lewis recently found himself at the scene of a murder involving none other than Rose’s police officer ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), the person who witnessed Rose’s self-immolation in the final minutes of the first film and damned himself. in the process. The opening scene of Smile 2 shows Joel attempting to take advantage of the only known loophole in the curse by killing a drug lord’s lackey for him in an attempt to transfer the curse to someone Joel believes deserves such a fate. Instead, a shootout ensues and both drug dealers are killed, leaving Lewis – who Joel didn’t know was there – as the only living witness and heir to the curse. Joel makes a run for it, but is promptly splashed into the street by an oncoming car in a very gory sequence that sets the tone for the next two-plus hours of the film’s running time.

The treacherous horror of fame

In a rare feat for a horror sequel, Smile 2 improves on the original’s conceit by making the stakes higher, more fun, and many times more torturous to see the games reach their inevitable conclusion.

Even before she contracts Lewis’s curse, Skye finds herself in an impossible situation. Faced with intense pressure to succeed from her label, parent manager (Rosemarie DeWitt) and legions of fans, any sign of weakness or unreliability is treated as evidence of her falling back down the rabbit hole of addiction and mental instability. At the height of her drug-induced bad behavior, she alienated her childhood best friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula), the only person she could be truly vulnerable with, and now she has no one to confide in about her increasingly volatile behavior. headroom.

It’s lonely at the top, as they say, and by connecting the influence of the franchise’s devilishly grinning demon with the evil effects of reaching a certain level of fame, Skye’s descent into hell becomes an apt metaphor for the tendency of our culture to chew and spit. rising young stars, especially female ones.

“I love the pop world. I’m fascinated by some of these women – these personas out there, who is the real person behind that velvet robe,” Finn told Hollywood channel Hollywood. Reporter of the inspiration for Smile 2. “And once I came across this idea of ​​this mega pop star in Skye Riley, I got a little bit electrified by it and became obsessed with it.”

A predictably brutal ending

Smile 2 can’t quite deliver on the promise of the premise and ultimately relies on the same trick of the original: much of what we see Skye experience as she hurtles toward the end of the curse’s weeklong expiration date is actually all in her head. But as any horror fan probably predicted from the start, it’s still a suitably gruesome event as Skye takes the stage in front of a packed stadium of screaming fans just as time runs out to keep the demon at bay. final twist.

Skye’s suicide is virtually the only example of bloodshed in the entire film from which the camera pans away. Instead, we get front row seats to her fans’ panicked reactions, knowing that they are all now the next to suffer the consequences of the smiling possession. How that superspreader event will play a role in the future of the franchise is still unclear, according to Finn.

‘There are so many exciting paths Smile can go down,” he told the newspaper Hollywood Reporter. ‘We have to wait and see how the public reacts to it Smile 2but I think that’s the beauty of it Smile there is an opportunity to tell all different kinds of stories and place ourselves in different worlds Smile then comes in and invades.”

Still, it might make you wonder if it’s all worth it the next time you wait in line at Ticketmaster for hours.