Portraying the life of a diva pop star – or at least doing so convincingly – is not the easiest thing a film can accomplish. There are too many real counterparts. Director Brady Corbet (“The Brutalist”), along with Natalie Portman, got about halfway into “Vox Lux.” Lady Gaga drew from elements of her own legend, but was smart enough to play the heroine of ‘A Star Is Born’ as not a version of himself, created a character for the ages. More recently, M. Night Shyamalan seemed to make “Trap” primarily to embody his aspiring musician daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, as a pop singer — which she did with aplomb in concert, less convincingly in the backstage scenes. So when you hear that ‘Smile 2’, Parker Finn’s follow-up to his effective if overwrought creep-out horror film from two years ago, centers around a pop star, you might not exactly expect a deep immersion into pop music. universe.

After all, the first “Smile” was a movie where people were possessed by a strange demon, causing them to have a breakdown over the course of a week, after which they flash an insidious nightmare smile at someone else and commit suicide right in front of their eyes , after which the demon entered the body of the one who witnessed the suicide. Complicated! Or maybe just complicated. The premise of “Smile” all made sense, as the host-hopping demon is a descendant of those from “It Follows” and (going back to the ’80s) “The Hidden.” Yet the film, as lively as it was, often seemed like a glorified vehicle for all those self-mutilating deaths and frozen rictus grins.

“Smile 2” is different. It’s got all that stuff, but it’s a horror movie that strives to create a real emotional center. And that’s because it really is about a pop star – a dancing queen idol named Skye Riley (played with yes-she-really-could-be-one authenticity by British actor and singer Naomi Scott), who from the start fends off demons that are all too human. A year earlier, Skye, under the influence of drugs, was seriously injured in a car accident that killed her movie star boyfriend. Since then, she’s been on the mend (in every sense) and is about to launch a comeback tour. We see her reintroduce herself to her audience with an appearance in “Drew” (with Drew Barrymore playing himself), where she shows off her new Edie Sedgwick hairdo along with her practiced air of chastened arrogance.

Sticking close to Skye’s point of view, the film takes us through her life: the rehearsals and costume changes, the compulsive guzzling of designer bottles of Voss water, her bickering relationship with her loving but parasitic manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), her increasingly severe case of the chilling impulse of trichotillomania, and her parade of fans queuing for their turn to pose with her in ‘badass’ selfies. Nearly every scene of “Smile 2” is imbued with the realization that being a pop star in the 21st century means acting like an industry: an endless exercise in corporate image management.

When you look at someone like Ariana Grande or Olivia Rodrigo, it is sometimes not difficult to see the vulnerable human being behind the cultivated star facade. Naomi Scott features both of you in ‘Smile 2’. Since Skye has been struggling with a demon that invaded her, plus the memories of that nightmarish car accident, not to mention all the destruction her selfishness has caused (this demon likes to have a built-in mental torment to work with), her life and career begin to fall apart. But to everyone around her, who cannot see the demon, she appears to be panicking. And in a way, maybe she is. “Smile 2” is a flash-cut horror parable, but the story it tells is that pop fame drives you crazy. The film is hardly subtle, yet Parker Finn has become a filmmaker smart enough to make reality feel like a hallucination and hallucinations feel like reality.

The smile, as before, can come from almost anywhere (like the tween girl with braces in the fan queue), but often comes from someone close to Skye. And that can be just as disturbing as a jump. The horror begins when she goes to visit Lewis (Lukas Gage), an old high school friend who is now a high-end drug dealer. While on cocaine, he has become a gibbering bigwig who then kills himself by hitting his face with a round 35-pound training weight. It’s all very flashy, but then Skye comes into contact with Gemma (Dylan Gelula), the unpretentious best friend she blew away when she was at the height of her drug frenzy. Their reunion, at Skye’s apartment, draws us in, and so we hardly expect Gemma to flash The Smile. One of the film’s chilling highlights is when Skye is visited by her backup dancers, in a sequence that would make Bob Fosse smile from his grave.

Asked to be a presenter at a children’s benefit, Skye must read a canned speech from a teleprompter, which turns into a literal bad dream, pushing her to go over the edge. The scene climaxes with her dead boyfriend walking onstage while flashing The Smile (that Ray Nicholson is the actor son of Jack Nicholson makes him genetically predisposed to do this well). When she lashes out at this mirage by pushing the wrong person off the stage, it’s a moment of the purest funny cringe.

The best thing about “Smile 2” is that it keeps the audience off balance, starting with the way Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s unsettling electronic score works on us. Skye’s story is full of trap doors that keep giving access to her repressed reality, and Naomi Scott plays this with great skill. She’s not just some girl making a horror movie; we develop a sympathetic understanding of Skye and her predicament, namely that she is surrounded by counselors but feels increasingly alone. By the time she goes to a bar to meet Morris (Peter Jacobson), who has a plan to defeat the demon, all she has to do is agree to have her heart stop for two minutes! – a sudden onslaught of fans looking to bond with her on TikTok seems as much of a nightmare as anything in the movie.

But by the time Skye ends up in the freezer of an abandoned Pizza Hut to carry out Morris’ plan, the film has become too jittery and drawn out for its own good. The ending is destined to leave the audience scratching their collective heads, and that’s because Parker Finn, now in love with the ‘Smile’ mythology he created, gets grandiose about it. The film reaches its climax with a body-horror maximalism coupled with a minimum of logic. But until then, it wrings honest shocks from the unnerving hothouse of unreality that is pop stardom.