Naomi Scott in it Smile 2.
Photo: Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection

Smile 2 has one really good idea, which is that the daily life of a confused pop megastar is indistinguishable from the screeching horrors of a supernatural horror film. Whenever director Parker Finn runs with that idea, the film packs a nice, disorienting punch. The victims of horror films usually suffer alone, stalked through dark, empty houses, remote forests or deserted corridors. Smile 2However, the film’s superstar protagonist is constantly surrounded by people: hangers-on, assistants, fans and gawkers. She suffers in full view of the public, with people around her who could presumably help. That turns out to be just as disturbing as a creepy lake or a cabin in the woods, and also metaphorically more powerful.

The film follows a few days in the life of global pop icon Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who returns to performing after a stint in rehab and a long hiatus following a horrific car accident that left her scarred and her actor boyfriend Paul died. Ray Nicholson). But when her old friend and dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) flashes a sinister smile before gleefully smashing his own head open with a 35-pound weight plate, things really start to go haywire. Skye begins to see the figure of Lewis lurking around her, as well as that of the long-dead Paul. Most importantly, she starts to see the smile – that disturbing, unnatural, toothy grin from the first film that tells us demonic possession may be afoot.

At its best, Smile 2 let us guess if Skye is being haunted or just dealing with the craziness of fandom. Is the sweaty, clingy creep who wants her to sign his T-shirt and won’t leave her alone a monster from the afterlife, or just a run-of-the-mill stalker? What about her relentlessly supportive mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) or her submissive assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley)? Then there’s the fact that Skye is a recovering addict. (The only reason she visits a dealer is because she isn’t allowed to take prescription painkillers, but is still in pain from all her post-accident surgeries.) Could the things following her be drug-induced hallucinations? Okay, maybe “let’s guess” is an exaggeration: We know the true answer to all these questions, even if Skye doesn’t. But while the film is too much of a standard horror film to keep things ambiguous, it does make us think about how the fake smiles that surround celebrities are not all that different from the evil smiles that surround the film’s protagonists, victims. Smile franchise.

Director Finn has clearly thought about this, and he wisely doesn’t just repeat the narrative stations of the first film. He made his feature film debut with that film, a surprise 2022 hit that was an expansion of a short film he had made two years earlier. But Smile ran out of steam after establishing the convenient premise of an invisible viral demon that plastered disturbing grins on people’s faces before they committed suicide. A world in which other people’s smiles became monstrous threats was a brilliant visual idea, one of both eerie immediacy and symbolic charge, but the film ultimately lost itself amid the predictable demands of a genre film.

Unfortunately, Smile 2 is similarly torn between the novel premise and the fundamental demands of horror. It’s hard not to look at Skye’s spiraling reality and think of all the young non-fictional celebrities who have melted away before our eyes over the years: the Britneys, the Lindsays, the Amandas and Aarons and others. And while Scott’s suitably shocked performance helps, the film never quite succeeds in making us care about Skye, partly because she’s a victim from the start and things never settle down long enough for us to get any sense of her as a kind can get. character. The film’s empathy consists largely of abstraction, with Finn exaggerating Skye’s frayed consciousness. Just as we should feel something for her increasingly helpless situation, he bludgeons us with ineffective jump scares – cheap, random, clumsily telegraphed and accompanied by loud bangs and crashes on the soundtrack – and increasingly meaningless dream visions.

Just like in the first film, the director has one go-to move that he relies on time and time again: following a certain story path before revealing it: psycho! – it didn’t really happen. He wants it to be a rug-pulling mindfuck, but the more it happens, the more it devalues ​​everything we see. As Skye becomes less and less able to tell what is really happening and what is a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should feel more for her. of her. Instead, we lose interest as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a bit cynical and cruel. The film ultimately undermines its own ambitions.