The world is on fire. Innocent people are dying. Hurricanes are ripping away homes. Fascism looms large. Parker Finn’s “Smile” movies don’t tackle our global anxieties directly but they do understand that seeing someone happy in the early 21st century is deeply disturbing. The only reason some could possibly have to smile this wide, to Finn’s way of thinking, is if they were a demon from hell.
The original “Smile” hit like a ton of bricks. The film starred Sosie Bacon as a therapist who witnesses a patient killing themselves while grinning ear to ear. She’s so disturbed by the incident that she starts seeing smilers everywhere, only to discover that it’s not in her head. She’s been cursed by a demon who feeds on anguish and drives people mad over the course of six days, before leaping to somebody else in another shocking act of violence.
The curse itself is a blunt force allegory for processing trauma, but a whole generation can relate. Parker Finn could have rested on the metaphor (or possibly the s(i)mile) and called it a day, but he filmed “Smile” with an uncanny eye for looming dread and a melodramatic knack for jump scares. The film was small in scope but made a huge impact, but it seemed likely that a sequel — inevitable for any $17 million film that grosses $217 million — would struggle to recapture that magic. How do you tell a story about the exact same curse that won’t get dimmed by familiarity?
The answer, Finn apparently discovered, was not to worry about it. “Smile 2” plays a whole lot like “Smile,” except this time the victim is a pop music superstar named Skye Riley (Naomi Scott, “Aladdin”). She’s a recovering addict about to kick off her comeback tour, one year after an automobile accident killed her actor boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson, “Licorice Pizza”), and left her scarred and in constant pain.
Skye runs out of Vicodin and calls her dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage, “Road House”), but when she gets to his apartment he’s a wreck. He nearly decapitates her with a sword but hey, look, she really needs that Vicodin, red flags be damned. So she sticks around, and he puts on a shit-eating grin and murders himself in spectacular fashion, transferring the smile-demon curse to Skye.
“Smile 2” doesn’t go from 0 to 60, it goes from 60 to 100. After a rollercoaster opening sequence that reveals whatever happened to Joel, the police officer played by Kyle Gallner in the original, we shift focus to the fast-paced and high-intensity world of celebrity stardom. Before demonology even enters into it that’s an exasperating line of work, with Skye pulled in every direction by business obligations, family expectations, oppressive overscheduling, physically exhausting performances, and always the need to put on a smile — no matter how miserable she is.
When we first meet Skye she’s already on the verge of a breakdown, so seeing monsters wherever she looks doesn’t help. As her curse gets worse she starts hallucinating, and detaches completely from reality, right along with the audience. It’s genuinely difficult to tell what’s really happening in “Smile 2,” and what’s just an evil supernatural episode of MTV’s “Punk’d.”
Naomi Scott gives a demanding performance, in that she’s pushed in every direction by Parker Finn’s exhausting story, and that she demands the audience’s attention. She finds the line between despicable and pitiful, and by walking it she makes Skye’s unusual plight empathetic. Everyone else is a plot point or a cartoon character, which is just fine, since part of Skye’s tragedy is that she no longer has real human connections. Her isolation makes Skye the perfect host for an evil entity that feeds on despair and the broad caricatures she surrounds herself with are easily mimicked by a cheerful devil.
Parker Finn has come up with plenty of new jump scares, some of which will startle even the hardest core of horror fans. What makes “Smile 2” feel like an evolution is Finn’s new playful streak. The first “Smile” was oppressive and cruel to the hero and the audience alike, but “Smile 2” takes real glee in ruining its hero’s life and manipulating the audience. You can tell that Finn and his crew were having fun trying to top themselves, and they mostly have. (Also, the film’s constant — constant — product placement for Voss bottled water is a recurring joke that somehow never gets old.)
The injection of nervous laughter into the film’s nervous breakdown is a welcome relief, but it’s always short-lived; there’s another freakout around every corner. Finn never entirely justifies the film’s over two-hour running time but he keeps his story moving frenetically from one Lovecraftian mind-scramble to another, introducing a few new elements to the mythology, and culminating in a memorably disturbing finale. And it’s not done yet: The closing credits score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer is some of the best outro music in years, losing its sanity right along with the rest of us.
“Smile 2” is more of the same. A lot more. But it’s just as scary, and this time it’s feistier and funnier, proving that the premise has legs and also some malleability. Whether or not there’s any hope for the rest of us there’s still hope for the “Smile” franchise, and in a world full of misery and malignancy, at least that’s one thing we can grin about.
A Paramount Pictures release, “Smile 2” opens exclusively in theaters on Oct. 18.
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