‘Smile 2’ Review: Light Up Your Face with Gladness; Parker Finn’s Horror Franchise Sequel is Overly Familiar but Boasts an Impressive Sense of Style

Smile 2, the sequel to 2022’s horror franchise breakout, opens with one of the boldest sequences you’ll find in mainstream cinema this year. We’re re-introduced to Joel (Kyle Gallner), the co-protagonist in Smile whose fate was sealed as being doomed with the curse of the malignant, grinning entity from whom the series receives its namesake. On-screen text reads “6 Days Later,” as if there’s been a simple cut from the end of the first film to the beginning of this one, perfectly propelling the trajectory of the narrative forward. What follows is a minutes-long one-take (or, more likely, digitally stitched) tracking shot following Joel as he acts out his plan to latch the demon onto someone else, notable not necessarily for remarkable or original story progression but for the way it’s conveyed. The scene is in constant motion, immediately throwing you into the perspective of the subject on-screen, filled with convincing bouts of desperation, physicality, and strange details, such as Russian gangsters trying to enjoy pumpkin Frappuccinos. It’s an appropriate microcosm for the Smile movies as an enterprise: often familiar to a fault, straining for its own inventiveness, and yet constructed with a robust sense of style and populated with enough off-kilter details that often coalesce into something memorable. 

It’s also something of a misdirect when it comes to priming expectations of what will unfold over the next two hours of Smile 2, even if only slightly. The sequence feels like a swing away from the somber dread of Smile, as if Smile 2 will now extrapolate the basis of its concept into something a little more unexpected. But even though Smile 2 expands the scope of its world, ups the ante of its set pieces, and boasts more extravagant production value, it feels plenty familiar when compared to its precursor, sometimes to its detriment.

The opening eventually gives way to our new lead Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a mega-famous international pop star about to embark on a world tour that doubles as an act of redemption after becoming a target of scrutiny in the media. She’s just getting back in the swing of the day-to-day toil of rehearsals, charity appearances, and fan meet-and-greets when she’s exposed to the violent trigger which causes the inexplicable smile demon to attach itself to her. Soon, Skye is questioning her own reality and navigating a world now seemingly full of violent occurrences owed to the presence of menacing, eerily smiling friends and strangers.

In practice, Smile 2 enacts a similar routine to the film it’s building off of: scenes of reality-driven character drama, where we keep up with the struggles of a protagonist with notable trauma from their past haunting them in the present day, increasingly give way to sequences of the uncanny and the unreal, undoing the certainty of both the main character and the audience. Scenes are initially framed as real-life events and then revealed to be deceptions by the resident malignant entity, pulling the rug out from a reliable perception of actuality or truth for the duration of the runtime. These tricks can be effective, but they can also be repetitive, especially considering the length of the Smile films—each around two hours—and after already having been taught the procedure of how this series operates.

That said, director Parker Finn once again proves adept at crafting horror with flair. Building on his work in Smile, Finn delivers a stylish chiller that feels just a bit off-kilter for a major studio release, evoking the strange, residual DNA of J-Horror classics like Ringu and The Grudge, which share conceptual similarities with the Smile franchise. Finn is working overtime to live up to those influences. Once again collaborating with cinematographer Charlie Sarroff, the camera placement and utilization is meticulous, with pans and zooms that always feel motivated when it comes to reveals and revelations about the subjects on screen. Bare-bones, plain coverage this is not—the absorption of Sarroff’s images combined with the perturbing warbles of the off-kilter score by Cristóbal Tapia de Veer make for a horror movie whose unease is developed with brawn and merit. 

Though he moves the series setting to the world of larger-than-life pop stardom, Finn largely eschews much in the way of music industry satirizing or commentary, mostly using Skye’s profession as a launching pad for the unique circumstances and scenarios such a job invites. Smile 2 is still firmly entrenched in trauma-horror territory, as Skye’s terrorization becomes a more all-encompassing representation of guilt, regret, and repentance. This ground is more than well-tread, but Finn smartly keeps his script nimble by oscillating between dread and a mild sense of camp, often ready to poke fun at his concept before letting things become too self-serious. This is a different direction than the drab moodiness of the previous film, and it’s a welcome change of pace, if only to serve as a distinction between the two films. Here, we have a movie where a pair of shit-stained underwear act as an ominous portend of danger, and where the lead character is put into a situation that allows her to shout in earnest terror and despair, “STOP SMILING AT ME!”

Scott takes such tonal shifts in stride, perfectly modulating her performance to the necessary balance of moods happening simultaneously. The bulk of Smile 2 lives within the facial expressions and physicality she conveys as Skye’s mental state collapses in real time, witnessing abject horrors that are by turns terrifying and bizarre, with Finn finding novel ways to make people smiling look genuinely pretty creepy. One standout set piece takes advantage of Skye’s entire troupe of backup dancers, whose eldritch visages are only made more frightening by their bizarre physical movements.

The general narrative makeup of Smile 2 is excessively familiar to the beats found in the first film, right down to the sudden shift to phantasmagoric creature imagery in the eleventh hour which, don’t worry, Finn follows through on with aplomb. But, it makes one wonder about the ceiling that the Smile films have based on the premise alone—how much further Finn can take a franchise that seems to have already settled into a semi-predictable groove. Smile 2 is another slick undermining of the expectations that come with polished studio horror, but one that will make you think that Finn’s first unambiguously great movie may be waiting on the other side of franchise teeth-cutting. 

B-

Paramount Pictures will release Smile 2 only in theaters on October 18.