Smile was everything we’ve come to expect from a modern horror film. A tight and intimate picture with a relatively small budget, a brilliant premise, stellar thematic allegory about trauma and mental illness, and it was legitimately damn scary to boot. This movie was more than good enough as is, and it never should’ve been given a sequel. And a sequel with a higher budget (going from $17 million to $28 million, admittedly) sounded like a terrible idea.

But then came the trailer.

For those who need a refresher, the previous film introduced us to a demonic curse that killed the target within seven days, typically by way of forcing hallucinations and false memories. In most cases, the cursed individual is driven to apparent suicide, and the curse passes on to whomever witnesses the suicide. The only known means of beating the curse is to commit cold-blooded murder in front of a witness — the curse then goes to the witness, but the murderer is spared the curse.

Oh, and don’t ask what happens if someone cursed tries to kill themselves in isolation. They tried that in the first movie and, uh… let’s just say the curse has ways around that.

The trailers for the sequel introduced us to Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), an international pop star
who comes under the curse. A fatal curse in pathological need of an audience. Meaning that if Skye kills herself in front of a big enough audience, spreading the curse to all those thousands of eyeballs, we could be looking at an extinction-level chain reaction. And this premise plays into the mental illness angle, considering the long and tragic history of pop stars succumbing to work stress, drug abuse, and “exhaustion” in addition to the stereotypical artistic eccentricities.

You son of a bitch, I’m in. What have we got?

Smile 2 picks up six days after the first movie, so Joel (a returning Kyle Gallner) is just about at the end of his rope. And sure enough, he’s dead by the opening credits. But not before an attempt at cheating the curse that was legitimately clever and literal inches away from working. Anyway, the bottom line is that Joel dies and passes the curse to a drug dealer (Lewis, played by Lukas Gage). Which brings us to the drug dealer’s old high school classmate, now a world-famous pop star.

(Side note: I can think of one or two characters from the first movie that Joel probably should’ve cursed instead, but oh well.)

We meet Skye after she hit rock bottom, coming off a long history of substance abuse that culminated in a car accident that killed her boyfriend at the time (actor Paul Hudson, played by Ray Nicholson). After a year of tabloid scandal, rehab, and writing new music, Skye is ready to come back with a new tour.

Unfortunately, Skye is still dealing with flashbacks of the car crash and it isn’t always easy staying sober. There’s also the matter of her former best friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula), emblematic of all the bridges that remain burned a year after Skye’s destructively shitty behavior. I might add that due to residual damage from the car crash, Skye is left with chronic and debilitating back pain (limiting her ability to dance onstage) and a massive scar that means she can’t wear anything exposing her midriff (a problem for any woman who makes her living on sex appeal).

In summary, Skye is perfectly primed as the victim of this particular curse when she picks the wrong drug dealer for her painkillers.

Given how the first movie put such a heavy emphasis on generational trauma and family dysfunction, it seems only fitting that we should start with Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt). She’s Skye’s mother and also her manager, and the film goes into great length demonstrating why merging those two roles is a bad idea. Repeatedly, it’s shown how dangerous and destructive it can be when Elizabeth inevitably stops treating Skye as a daughter and consistently treats her as a meal ticket. (Yes, I know some instances may or may not be the curse playing tricks with Skye’s head, the point stands).

While the first movie dealt extensively with the protagonist’s professional and work-related stresses, the sequel jacks all that up by several magnitudes. Skye’s work-related stress is a thousand times worse because of all the money involved, the high-powered executives involved, and the relentless media scrutiny. And with all due respect to Dr. Rose Cotter and all her patients, she never had to deal with deranged fans and psychotic stalkers like Skye has to interact with en masse. Not to mention all the various montages of the intense physical stress that goes into what Skye does onstage and behind the scenes, under a harsh timetable. And again, all of this is greatly augmented by Skye’s ongoing rehabilitation and her unrelenting need to make the best of this second chance.

This whole franchise is built on sexist double-standards with regard to how women are expected to look and act in a pleasing manner. After all, the central motif is a smile that’s made to look creepy and threatening. The topic is mostly subtext in the first movie, but it’s explicitly textual in the sequel. At one point late in the movie, one character straight-up tells Skye to smile when she’s onstage. As with Rose, Skye’s degrading physical appearance is emblematic of her fraying mental/emotional state, but it’s such a bigger deal in this movie because Skye’s career hinges entirely on her beauty.

I need hardly add that the filmmakers are crystal clear in condemning the exploitation of Skye, ignoring all her cries for help and all the giant red flags to show she isn’t fit to continue performing. It’s bad enough that Skye’s mother, the record executives, the fans, and pretty much the entire world are pushing Skye past the breaking point for their own benefit with no regard to her welfare. And it would be more than bad enough if any entertainer in her position had a critical meltdown that resulted in somebody dead onstage.

All of that is made immeasurably worse by the knowledge that in this particular case, pushing Skye to perform onstage while she’s suffering from a supernatural curse could literally bring about the goddamn apocalypse.

Speaking of the music, I have to tip my hat to Idarose, who handled most of the producing/writing work on the soundtrack (with Naomi Scott herself performing all the songs and co-writing a couple as well). I love how most of the lyrics come from a place of trauma and insecurity — it’s so darkly ironic, considering the themes and methods of the franchise. More importantly, considering how Skye herself is trying to pull herself out of a dark chapter in her life, it makes sense that she would write songs like these. Hell, it’s easy to buy into the notion that a legion of fans would latch onto these songs as a way to get through hard times and idolize Skye for it.

From start to finish, this is Naomi Scott’s show. Her dynamic career-defining performance is easily the best reason to see this movie. I know she’s been hovering just under the surface for a few years now [damn shame Power Rangers (2017), Charlie’s Angels (2019) and the live-action Aladdin didn’t break her way], but it’ll be a grave injustice if this isn’t the breakout performance she’s been working toward. As with the first movie, the lead actress is the powerhouse selling point while the rest of the supporting cast is sadly uneven.

Ray Nicholson unquestionably inherited one of the creepiest smiles in cinema history, but the film makes shockingly little use of it. Rosemarie DeWitt only gets one scene to show any kind of acting muscle, and her character is regrettably subdued through most of the runtime. Miles Gutierrez-Riley is a one-dimensional lickspittle, though at least he provides a bit of welcome levity. By contrast, Peter Jacobson puts his well-practiced character actor chops to good use, and Dylan Gelula is probably the only supporting actor in this cast who can match Scott pound-for-pound.

Otherwise, the other huge nitpick here is that we’re dealing with a totally new protagonist with no connection to the events of the previous film. Which means we’re stuck watching a main character go through more or less the exact same arc as the first movie, slowly and gradually overcoming her own disbelief until she finally learns everything we the audience already know. Granted, it’s from a totally new perspective with radically higher stakes, which helps keep it fresh.

Of course, it also helps that the jump scares and fake-outs are all diabolically clever. Between the two films (so far), this franchise has consistently delivered the best jump scares I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, as with the previous film, this third act goes even further overboard with the fake-outs and false timelines. Sure, we do get a shot at the end to confirm what really and canonically happened, but everything in the half-hour up to that point is absurdly convoluted.

Against all odds and expectations, Smile 2 delivered a worthy sequel to the first. Hell, it’s not just a worthy sequel, it’s everything great about the first movie bumped up by a few orders of magnitude and served with a darkly ironic pop soundtrack. Unfortunately, the sequel also comes with many of the same flaws (namely an uneven supporting cast and a labyrinthine third act). That said, I appreciate how the two films are separate enough and distinct enough that anyone could watch and enjoy the sequel even if they’ve never seen the first. It’s better if you have, but still.

While I was initially against a sequel to the first movie, I honestly don’t have the first fucking clue about a sequel for this one. The way things end up, I can’t decide if a third movie is impossible or inevitable. Regardless, Parker Finn has proven himself one of this generation’s great horror filmmakers (I would totally put him in the same class as Radio Silence and Fede Alvarez) and I’m excited to see whatever he does next.