Smile 2 Review – More of a Grimace, Really

Smile 2 is excellent at what it does, but that means it’s an extremely unpleasant watch. The cinematography, music, and performances keep you locked in and holding your breath. Thematically, the sequel finds a few new points to add to its trauma dissection, but they get a bit lost in the shuffle. As a whole, it’s a wild ride that will provoke nearly every reaction aside from smiling.

Writer/director Parker Finn is only known for the Smile movies. He directed the 2022 original as a feature-length adaptation of his 2020 short, “Laura Hasn’t Slept.” From humble beginnings and a $17 million budget, the first outing brought in more than $200 million. Impossibly, Finn’s next project will be a remake of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 classic Possession. It’s not as on-theme as it sounds, but Finn deserves a chance to branch out.

Smiling for the Cameras

Smile 2’s relationship to its predecessor is extremely important in the film’s first five minutes and otherwise immaterial. Naomi Scott portrays the new victim, recovering pop star Skye Riley. Skye recently suffered a terrible car crash that killed her boyfriend and left her gravely injured, but she’s working on a comeback. Her previous substance abuse problems force her to turn to a friendly drug dealer for pain meds, but that pesky grinning demon happened to infect the poor lad. Subsequently, Skye watches her dealer take his own life and starts to see sinister smiles in every corner of her high-pressure lifestyle. Like Rose from the previous outing, Skye struggles to convince her loved ones of the danger she’s in before it becomes too late. The big differences between the two come in the fine details.

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Skye Riley is quite used to people smiling at her. Her life is a mess of false promises, rapturous praise, manipulative hanger-ons, and a million internalized voices with very different messages. The film constantly depicts Skye through mirrors, windows, or distant perspectives, physically keeping us a few feet back from the star. Like in the first film, Finn loves long single takes that seem to carry the audience through unflinching horror by literally refusing to blink. It’s a cinematic language that never whispers what it could scream. At every turn, Smile 2 demands a degree of enhanced endurance from its audience. It all but chains you to Skye Riley, forcing you to suffer as she does. Fear, paranoia, doubt, misery, and even social awkwardness shine brilliantly through her performance and into your brain. You will want to be anyone else.

Evil Expressions

Is the image of a person smiling really that scary? Nope. It’s a bit like clowns, nuns, and old people. It’s a tiny bit creepy under the right circumstances, but it’s entirely up to the filmmaker to turn it into a genuinely frightening tableau. Parker Finn finds a good few ways to pull that off, but the scares here are primarily of the jump variety. If you’ve seen the first one, you should know that going in. Smile 2 is often at its best when it can gradually introduce a scare. The gore works well enough. A standout moment involves a gang of smiling assailants who move as a unit, but it rarely gets to be that deliberate. Some of the scares in this movie would genuinely be embarrassed to appear in an early 2000s YouTube screamer compilation.

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The scares lead into my other major issue with the film. If you’ve seen Smile, you know it fits comfortably into the subgenre of horror films that mess with perception. You never quite know what is or isn’t real in this franchise. This has the intended effect of leaving you on edge every moment of the runtime. It also, in some cases, has the unintended effect of making everything feel a bit meaningless. The smiling demon can essentially rewrite an hour of screentime with little more than a stylish camera trick. There are no rules, and anything could turn out to be an illusion. A Nightmare on Elm Street has two distinct states, dreaming and wide-awake. The characters are either up and safe or not and not. Smile 2 offers you no such courtesy. You’ll find yourself shrugging off one or two huge moments because you’re expecting another gotcha.

I believe in measuring a film by how well it does what it sets out to do. By that metric, Smile 2 is an unquestionable success. Is it perfect? Of course not. I’m reasonably certain Voss Water provided upwards of 70% of the funding for the film. It’s some of the most naked, label-out-to-camera product placement I’ve seen outside of American Idol. Still, if you can pull yourself away from thoughts of artesian water and really immerse yourself in this miserable experience, Smile 2 will put some kind of look on your face. My guess would be the open-mouthed wince associated with sucking air through your teeth.