How “Smile 2” improves on the original

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Smile 2.

What’s worse, being infected by a sadistic demonic entity that feeds on the trauma of its victims or the crushing loneliness of a superstar?

In Smile 2now in theaters, Naomi Scott delivers a star-studded performance as Skye Riley, a global pop sensation about to embark on a new world tour who finds herself confronting the hellish torments of these two phenomena over the course of an endless nightmare of a week. Many thanks to M. Night Shyamalan CatchIt’s not the first horror film of the year to delve into the discourse surrounding society’s obsession with pop prodigies, but it’s arguably the more poignant attempt.

The horror sequel from franchise writer and director Parker Finn appears two years after its predecessor. Smilebecame a buzzy genre breakthrough, grossing over $217 million worldwide and becoming one of the biggest box office successes of 2022. The first film focuses on Sosie Bacon’s Dr committing suicide while smiling eerily at her. Of course, it turns out that she has inherited a supernatural curse, personified by a shape-shifting parasitic spirit that subjects its targets to extreme psychological torment for seven days before completely possessing them and forcing them to kill themselves in front of another person , so he can latch on to a new host. It’s a premise that’s clearly cut from the same chain possession cloth as iconic horror entries The ring And It follows– but tweaks the formula to heavily emphasize a maniacal grin.

Let’s put a smile on that face

This time, the demon sets out to cause much greater suffering by infecting Skye, one of the world’s most famous musicians. And boy, does she have a lot of trauma to enjoy. A year earlier, Skye’s previous partying culminated in a horrific car accident that killed her actor boyfriend Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson, son of the sinisterly smiling master Jack Nicholson) and left her with a broken leg and a debilitating back injury. The crash was Skye’s rock bottom, forcing her to sober up and try to come to terms with her all-encompassing grief and guilt. Now she fights her cravings for drugs and alcohol by drinking glass bottles of Voss water (an over-the-top product placement that somehow turns into a real plot point) and trying not to pull out her hair, which is already much shorter as a result of a desperate one Blow made necessary by the trichotillomania she has apparently developed since the accident.

When the film begins, Skye is on the verge of a career comeback. But it’s clear she’s still in pain, both physically and mentally. Dissuaded by doctors from getting a painkiller prescription due to her drug abuse, Skye turns to Lewis (Lukas Gage), a low-level drug dealer she knew in high school, to get the Vicodin she needs to cure her pain Relieving back pain enough to allow her to perform at her best.

Unfortunately, Lewis recently found himself at the scene of a murder involving none other than Rose’s ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), the police officer who witnessed Rose’s self-immolation in the final minutes of the first film and damned himself in the process. The opening scene of Smile 2 shows Joel trying to exploit the only known loophole in the curse by killing a drug lord’s lackey in front of him in order to pass the curse on someone Joel believes deserves such a fate. Instead, a shootout ensues and both drug dealers are killed, leaving Lewis – who Joel didn’t know was there – as the only living witness and heir to the curse. Joel runs away, but is promptly thrown onto the street by an oncoming car. An extremely bloodthirsty sequence that sets the tone for the next two-plus hours of the film’s running time.

The insidious terror of fame

A rare feat for a horror sequel, Smile 2 improves on the conceit of the original by making the stakes bigger, more entertaining and a whole lot more torturous until it comes to its inevitable conclusion.

Even before she contracts Lewis’ curse, Skye already finds herself in an impossible situation. With enormous pressure to succeed from her label, her manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), and countless fans, any sign of weakness or unreliability is seen as evidence that she’s falling back down the rabbit hole of addiction and mental instability. At the height of her substance-induced misbehavior, she became estranged from her childhood best friend, Gemma (Dylan Gelula), the only person she could truly be vulnerable with, and now has no one to confide in about her increasing unstable headspace .

It’s lonely at the top, as they say, and by combining the influence of the franchise’s devilishly grinning demon with the malevolent effects of reaching a certain level of notoriety, Skye’s descent into hell becomes an apt metaphor for our culture’s bias to chew and spit out of aspiring young stars, especially female ones.

“I love the world of pop. I’m fascinated by some of these women – these personalities out there who are the real person behind that velvet robe,” Finn told Hollywood reporter the inspiration for Smile 2. “And when I kind of stumbled upon the idea of ​​this mega pop star in Skye Riley, I was just electrified by it and obsessed with it.”

A predictably brutal end

Smile 2 fails to quite deliver on the promise of its premise, and ultimately relies on the same trick as the original – that much of what we see Skye experience as she races toward the end of the curse’s week-long expiration date is actually all in her head happens. But as any horror lover probably predicted from the start, it’s still appropriately horrific as Skye finds herself onstage in front of a packed stadium full of screaming fans at the exact moment she’s running out of time to keep the demon at bay final twist.

Skye’s suicide is pretty much the only gory example in the entire film that the camera pans away from. Instead, we sit in the front row and witness the panicked reactions of their fans, knowing that they will all now be next to suffer the consequences of smiling possession of the ball. How this superspreader event will impact the future of the franchise is uncertain, according to Finn.

“There are so many exciting streets Smile could go under,” he told the Hollywood reporter. “We have to see how the audience reacts to it Smile 2but I think that’s the great thing about it Smile Is it possible to tell very different stories and put ourselves in different worlds? Smile then he comes in and invades.”

Still, the next time you find yourself waiting in a Ticketmaster queue for hours, you might think twice about whether it’s all worth it.