SMILE 2
2024
Written and directed by Parker Finn
I have to speculate that writer-director Parker Finn must have genuinely been stung by the way his first Smile—also his first feature—was received upon its release in 2022. That reception was of sufficient warmth, obviously, to put a Smile 2 in front of us, though the consensus was pretty condescending about it, mostly praising Finn for a fun toy built for startling people. Often, folks (myself included) would make it plain that to the extent he was doing good work, it was by not assuming that we ever gave one shit about the story he wrote, the heroine he created, or the canned themes he appeared to be using as an excuse for more mechanical but perhaps more primal pleasures. For my part, I pondered whether Finn might've even been lightly satirizing the oft-tedious current of "elevated horror" that's been the abiding mode of the genre for several years now. Accordingly, our reaction to Smile—"oh, it's about trauma, that's so novel and intelligent, but how's your jump scare game?"—was supposed to be a compliment, because within that "about trauma" structure and, indeed, as a result of Finn's "about trauma" monster, his jump scare game turned out to be inordinately good, and we figured that was his goal, since Finn's movie spent by far the balance of its time and energy on cultivating dread to harvest a bumper crop of nice, old-fashioned jolts.
Now I'm compelled to suppose that, actually, Finn did want us to give a shit, and he did not find this complimentary, so he went back to the drawing board to figure out what went wrong. I do not, needless to say, actually imagine this to be the case, but Smile 2 feels like it's addressing extremely specific criticisms I personally made. For instance, how its heroine somehow both figured out that she was the victim of a supernatural attack and still went blitheringly insane practically before the first act was over; the heroine of Smile 2 goes over her cliff at a much more dramatically-reasonable pace (even if that's a double-edged sword), despite starting much closer to its edge. The bit that feels eerily specific is that I guffawed, as I hope we all did, at an especially idiotic line—"mental illness can be genetic! I looked it up!"—that's sort of given its funhouse mirror here, in which genetic science is again invoked, when the heroine googles whether DNA can be detected in vomit. But now it's using this to show you that she's not particularly smart (it's not even an urgent question, since the cops would definitely let her know straightaway if they found any). And that, anyhow, is in keeping with the ways that Smile 2 doubles down on the most likeable aspect of Smile that wasn't jump-scares-and-creative-gore, its occasional forays into dryly-presented bleak humor, which is welcome, though it's not the primary means by which Smile 2 feels different. It's a quantum leap from Finn's first film, even if Smile 2 sure looks like an "exactly like the first one, only bigger" type of sequel.
Possibly the easiest way into explaining why it's not is to just describe the difference in plots, which wind up very different in kind, even if, at the most parsimonious level of summary, they're exactly identical—"a curse-monster, much like the curse-monsters in The Ring and It Follows, menaces a young woman." It's just not the same young woman. Still, by the same token, a different cast means a different approach, and while Smile's protagonist was a private citizen everywoman, in Smile 2 she's a public figure, pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott; and while it is perhaps too much to expect a man called "Parker Finn" to be able come up with names that don't feel completely synthetic, I'm not sure exactly how it profits me to know that Finn's favorite adult actresses of the 2010s were Riley Reid and Dakota Skye). The distinction, simply as a matter of staging the scare scenes, and long before we start wondering whether this activates any hifalutin ideas about celebrity's self-imposed panopticon, is obvious: pursued by a shapeshifting entity only she could see, Smile's heroine could freak out, but only on a person-sized scale; when Skye freaks out, everybody sees, and they all care so horribly much.
And so, in a prologue that doubles as an epilogue to Smile, Smile 2 brings back the cop boyfriend sidekick (Kyle Gallner) to finish him off in one of those we-used-to-call-'em-"bravura" long-takes that would still be fairly impressive, even in 2024, if it didn't show its hand with some substandard CGI right at the end; but by the time it's done, the film's sent its curse-monster on its new trajectory, intersecting with Skye. (For good and ill, Smile 2 expects you to have just diamond-solid memories of Smile; or, potentially, Finn's okay if you don't, since I'm fairly certain numerous liberties are being taken with "the Smile entity rules," by the guy who invented them. At this point, I'm no longer eager to ascribe narrative or structural satire to Finn's screenplays, but when he does offer us an exposition dump/recap scene, it'll be at least eighty minutes later, and this did make me laugh.)
Well, Skye, for her part, is in the process of semi-literally crawling out of the wreckage that's defined the last year of her life, when after a drugged-up bender alongside her actor boyfriend (Ray Nicholson), the pair of them flew off a mountain together in his car, killing him and leaving her a busted-up, scandal-stained mess. She's rebuilt her body and her career to a state that she's about to embark on a new tour, even if this feels more like her mother/manager Elizabeth's (Rosemarie DeWitt's) idea than hers. She has managed to stay off drugs—mostly. The injuries she sustained haven't healed very well, and appropriate medication is hard to acquire through proper channels now, thanks to her widely-publicized addiction troubles, and thus, after an especially grueling rehearsal, she surreptitiously ventures out to her old dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), albeit with no grander ambitions than to score a soupçon of Vicodin to manage her pain. Unfortunately—as we realize as soon as she opens his door and he puts a Goddamn katana to her throat, but as Skye won't know for a while—attached to Lewis is that invisible-to-everyone-else monster from before. In keeping with its nature, the monster makes Lewis kill himself before this witness, and of course, once that's happened, it'll be riding her. This will prove suboptimal, what with Skye's commitments to her label, not to mention that she was half-crazy and suicidal already, and in a controlled panic she's also left Lewis's corpse with all that DNA in her stomach lining sitting right next to it.
That's almost it for "plot" (honestly, even overstating how much "plot" there still might be). I've only taken us through about the first half hour of a movie that's more than four times that length, and it's astounding that there's not really another plot point until that aforementioned exposition dump/recap almost an hour later. It's likewise remarkable how cheerfully it accedes to its obligation to have any plot at all, considering what a bizarre fucking imposition this plot is: a completely new character (Peter Jacobson), also a complete stranger to Skye, arrives to fulfill the new sidekick duties, armed with a proposal to fight the monster with, like, actual mad science. It's jarring, even clumsy, but I slightly loved how the "normal" horror screenwriting here practically bounces right off this movie's side, without even particularly impacting it.
The thing is, Smile was a relatively "normal" horror movie, not a psychothriller, and if it fancied itself one, it was deluded; Smile 2 has the material to be a psychothriller, and it's good at it. I've already gestured at that in the difference between the protagonists: back in Smile, she was very clearly being driven mad by an objectively-real supernatural being, which was fun (I remember Sosie Bacon's livewire performance, without caring whether I remember her character's name), but it never felt like her struggle said all that much about her; meanwhile, Smile 2 comes perilously close to feeling like it doesn't even benefit from being "a Smile" in the first place, rather than a thing purely unto itself that, principally, exists to take delight in the possibility of some real honking madness. It's a little shocking that it achieves that anyway; Finn might have gotten pretty cavalier with those rules of his, but once you adjust to that, Smile 2 works awfully well as a subjective examination of Skye's collapsing reality that, because it is still a sequel to Smile, has access to Smile's established visual vocabulary and gives her breakdown the schizophrenia-inflected form of suddenly-sinister fans and coworkers, along with the vengeful ghosts of her past.
That doesn't mean there aren't any problems: probably the very smallest is the one I've been not-so-subtly hinting at, but it speaks volumes that it almost isn't a problem that this sequel to a junk horror movie runs 127 minutes, despite being the same scene over and over again, much like the first, 115-minute Smile was already too long and the same scene over and over again. Yet this one earns both its runtime and repetitive nature (we'll circle back, but, above all, Scott earns this). My most acute aggravation with these 127 minutes, in fact, is that Finn never quite finds just four to do any proper musical number, at least that isn't interrupted halfway through by compressing editing or (soon enough that you know, with a sunken heart, that a proper musical number is no longer on the table) a shapeshifting phantasm. Scott sings five songs for this movie, and not one to its natural endpoint in the movie, and while I'm not entirely sanguine about them, my objection doesn't require them to be bangers, just good enough for Finn to have bothered making Skye Riley's global phenomenon comprehensible out of them. The irritating thing is that Finn, choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, and costume designer Alexis Forte clearly have facility for doing pop music video in a 2010s vein. (I also understand that it's not really what Smile 2's audience is here for, but fuck 'em, because the story needs it; and the shame of it is more fiercely felt in a movie that otherwise never feels like it doesn't have real guts.) Besides that, there's little to complain about: mostly just the way Skye's mom's the haziest stereotype, which fits the narrow ways Smile 2 necessarily channels information, but it's not using it, so if it is "about" Skye's resentment towards a parasitic mother, that's because Finn has her say so aloud once, and because you're assuming that on his movie's behalf.
That leaves only good stuff: there's still that old Smile horror, and now (in line with that "psychothriller" bent) with even more of an emphasis on friends who become frightening, self-mutilating travesties of themselves. I think it's probably fair to say that Smile 2 is "less scary" than Smile, though what I'd mean by that is that it's less startling. It's not as eager to just pummel you, anyway, which is probably just a function of it being a more mature film; the better news is that it's more creative, and I think I'll be likelier to remember individual scares here, especially one involving car headlights, that about knocked me off my couch. Likewise, while it doesn't entirely address my "not even one real musical number, you fucking coward?" complaint, there's a setpiece involving the multiplication of the entity and Skye getting swarmed by her own "backup dancers," built on the choreographic conceit that as long as you stare back, they won't approach, but the moment you look away, they spring, that's real nice and creepy (and probably could've been exploited even further! but so it goes).
To boot, Finn has evolved his style past copying the last ten years of faux-austere horror. Now, that's all still here, and so we still have mounted cameras rotating in increments of 90 degrees on their y-axis, and, sure as the sun will rise, flying cameras rotating 180 degrees on their z-axis—and, despite upside down landscapes having never been fucking scary, a digitally-stitched zoom into an upside-down apartment with an upside-down heroine entering in a state of panic does justify it, for once, as an actual expressive gesture. But there's just more going on this time, starting with cinematographer Charlie Saroff pulling back on "2020s horror aesthetic" (such as he plied, albeit with more success than usual, on Smile), being more willing than too many of his contemporaries to stylishily-but-properly expose and lens everything, generally "making a movie," which is to this one's great benefit, especially in respect to Lester Cohen's production design, which nails Skye's gilded cage luxury, somehow gaudy and arid all at once, quite well. (Smile 2 has more use for its designers than its forebear: given that Smile was a movie where the sets were probably just houses and the costumes might as well have been the actors' own clothes, it's some admirable loyalty that Finn brought literally all of his department heads back, and it's wonderful how handsomely that loyalty was rewarded.) Meanwhile, the behind-the-camera contributor who was most overtly valuable last time, composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, is back too, with more anti-music/abrasive sound design accompaniment, and it's just as vital as before (if maybe a smidgen more expected now), plying a few new strategies, too, like "imperceptibly bleeding into Scott's songs" and "I think that's Anguirus attacking Osaka." Finn's also up to a whole lot of tricky transitions and fuguelike manipulations of time, as a huge part of how this tale gets told, conceding that we all know that the supernatural force has to be real, but continually insisting that just because that one thing is, it doesn't mean anything else we see, or that Skye sees, must be.
And that brings us to Smile 2's indispensable figure, simply Scott herself; and I don't want to say Finn's script hasn't made some challenging choices for her already, especially in how it never asks you to like Skye very much, nor even hangs much sympathy on her, and somehow getting even nervier about that as it goes along. This is some rivetingly mean-spirited horror, ending on one glorious note of outright nihilism, not suggesting for a moment that Finn could've been thinking about anything besides putting his little career-making horror franchise down forever. (That he is contemplating a Smile 3 is a little incomprehensible—it'd have to be pretty different, given that this one ends with, I assume, the apocalypse.) But Scott's the key, given the unenviable task of playing a character that almost explicitly doesn't even have a personality beyond those "diva bitch" superficialities, who still has to carry a very long horror movie as something akin to a complete one-woman show—there are other actors in this movie, and I've named several, and the only one who leaves a serious impression isn't one of them, just Miles Gutierrez-Riley as Skye's assistant, who (rather generously) is offering Smile 2 the performance best-attuned to its essential first-person perspective, in that his disgusting sycophancy would be how Skye sees him, and it's exactly why she can't stand him.
There are other good turns (Gage and Jacobson each offering a different flavor of weirdo), but no one else could be too terribly important in a movie where the modal image is just Scott with snot running from her nose. That's barely an exaggeration—other than the opening, and some cityscapes, I'd venture that there might not be any images that aren't of Scott, or of what Scott's experiencing, and a whole lot of those shots are long close-ups of Scott's face doing its work—and eventually we're going to have to nod towards The Substance, which is not "the same movie" but sure isn't dissimilar ("gory psychohorror with a sparkling sense of dark humor, about a female celebrity has-been who never meaningfully interacts with another human during the whole runtime of a film you'd rightfully assume is twenty minutes too long, which also ends with her on a stage"). Yet I might very cautiously assert that, in some respects, Scott had the harder gig, when The Substance's one-hander at least got shared between two actors, and Scott has to hold down the whole thing. Whatever else, The Substance—a better movie, don't mistake me—starts off with an automatic claim on your sympathies, and the more we learn of Skye, potentially the less we imagine she'd be any great loss, so Scott is working furiously uphill, making sure we know how painfully aware of her own wretched emptiness she is, which has the effect of making her struggle against that void compelling after all, even tragic, along with making the monster a much better metaphor than it had been for generic-ass "trauma."
Scott's strong enough to texture that with technique that isn't precisely "a personality"—maybe "a temperament"—but still forges a relatively-solid individual out of Skye, particularly Scott's fascinating expressions of perplexed, almost-skeptical hostility that are, in themselves, a major plank of that "bleak humor" I mentioned. Of course, "lots of close-ups with snot running from her nose" sums up the essentials of her participation in what's still very much a jump scare machine, and both of those physical touches come together in some earnestly excellent horror pratfalling, Scott turning out to be the champion of the world at scooting her ass backwards across a smooth floor in repulsion that shades into pique, something Finn must've realized was a unique flourish of her performance, since he has her do it a good three times. And that's Smile 2, which achieves ambitions such as I'd assumed its predecessor had only been kidding about, but, like its predecessor, it knows horror is supposed to be mean and fun at the same time—something, you might say, to make you smile.
Score: 9/10
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