“Why are you doing this to me?” asks Sosie Bacon’s Rose Cotter at the conclusion of Parker Finn’s 2022 breakout horror hit Smile. “Because your mind is so inviting,” responds the monster that’s been systematically driving her mad and feeding upon her trauma. Unlike many of the possession movies that the film is indebted to, its shapeshifting parasitic baddie isn’t content to just feed off of anyone. It has to be someone with a black well of darkness to drink deep from. With Smile 2, it becomes clearer why this is so uniquely disturbing, with Finn turning the personal into the apocalyptic and offering up a near-perfect sequel in terms of go-for-broke intensity and one-upmanship.
Rehearsing for her comeback tour, pop artist Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is still shaken by the very public breakdown that she suffered a year prior. In recovery and bearing the scars of the car accident that claimed her boyfriend’s life, Skye is clearly not ready to step back into the spotlight, but at the behest of her pushy manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) and record label, she’s doing her best to hold it together and perform for her fans.
One night, on the hunt for pain killers to soothe her aching back, Skye witnesses her terrified drug dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage), caving in his own face and is soon assailed by the same spectral tormenter that drove him to it. Desperate and increasingly unable to trust her own reality, she turns to a stranger, Morris (Peter Jacobson), with knowledge of what’s happening to her, in order to understand what must be done to stop the entity and get her life back.
Finn brings the same tightly controlled framing, devilishly effective jump scares, and penchant for tricky fake-outs that made Smile so striking despite its familiarity. Throughout, he fills his frames with the actors’ faces, turning them into transfixing, beautifully textured maps of pain and horror, foregrounding them as set pieces in their own right. Finn especially has a blast conceiving of new ways for his grim-grinning assailants to torment their victims (a crowd of fans moving as one throbbing mound of grabbing hands is a standout) and Smile’s much gabbed-about practical monster effects get a truly skin-crawling leveling-up.
Scott is spectacular as Skye increasingly finds herself in the throes of escalating terror. The series’s central conceit lends itself surprisingly well to a fame story, and there’s an acute sadness in how alone Skye is despite being surrounded by fans, tour personnel, and assistants every hour of the day. There’s a pointed social commentary in just how unwilling anyone is to help her in the wake of her very public breakdown, which feels like an extension of the first film’s not-so-subtle messaging of the ways in which we demonize mental health struggles.
Though the sequel is more humorous than its predecessor, Finn doesn’t shirk away from the soul-crushing misery at the film’s center. Intimations of addiction swirl throughout Smile 2, underscoring that this series is about the perverse human drive to live in trauma and dismantle the things we’ve built brick by brick. Finn, like his entity, is interested in getting his bony fingers into those sticky tender parts we’d rather hide away, slurping our pain like ambrosia and confronting us with the fact that more often than not, the enemy staring back is you.
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