Parker Finn's 2022 directorial debut Smile was one of the horror genre's biggest surprises of recent years. Trailers suggested it would be little more than yet another bland studio horror with an arresting gimmick it fails to exploit. But Finn's film turned out to be a thoughtful and disturbing supernatural thriller, one that took the cliché of "trauma" and actually did something interesting with the idea. As an allegory for mental health issues and the looming spectre of potential suicide, it somehow managed to avoid coming across as exploitative or distasteful.
With Smile, Finn gave us a fresh and invigorating take on the age-old narrative of a protagonist afflicted with a curse they spend the movie trying to shake off. After witnessing a patient commit suicide, a therapist found herself subjected to increasingly disturbing hallucinations featuring friends, colleagues and strangers whose faces contort into a rictus grin like Conrad Veidt in the silent horror classic The Man Who Laughs, an image which would later inspire Batman villain The Joker and William Castle's Mr. Sardonicus. It's eventually revealed that anyone affected by the curse has only a week to live and the only way to escape it is to pass it on by inflicting trauma on another unwitting victim else by killing someone in front of them.
Smile 2 opens with a dazzling one-shot sequence set six days after the climax of the first film, and Finn brilliantly uses this set-piece to efficiently detail how the curse is passed on to the anti-heroine of his sequel. A year after a car crash killed her actor boyfriend Paul (Ray Nicholson - casting the son of the actor with the most famous shit-eating grin in all of cinema is a genius move) and left her physically and psychologically scarred, pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is preparing to return to the limelight with an impending concert tour. She's kicked her drug habit but relies on contraband pills to cope with the intense back pain she has suffered since the accident. A visit to her dealer sees Skye become the latest recipient of the curse when her dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) seems to lose his mind and takes his life in brutal fashion before her eyes.
Where Smile gave us a therapist protagonist who had devoted her life to helping others, the sequel flips this idea by making Skye a narcissist who treats everyone around her with contempt. Rather than immediately alerting the authorities, Skye keeps Lewis's suicide a secret. When she begins to receive anonymous text messages from someone who claims to know she was in Lewis's apartment, she descends into a paranoid state, exacerbated when the curse begins to manifest itself in a series of grisly hallucinations.
Finn has largely used his sequel's beefed-up budget to fill out the background of Skye's pop star world, splashing out on elaborate stage setups and striking costumes. But it's essentially an intimate tale of a woman trying to convince those around her she's not going mad, even when she's not so certain herself. Scott gives a woman on the edge performance to rival Catherine Deneuve in Polanski's Repulsion and Susannah York in Altman's Images, two movies that have clearly influenced Finn. Having seen the first film, we as the audience know that most of what Skye is witnessing isn't real, but Scott convinces us that Skye isn't privy to that fact.
With its backstage shenanigans and determined performer, Smile 2 nods to Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, explicitly in the case of a scene involving a doomed rehearsal. There's also a lot of Argento's Opera, which also featured a singing protagonist coping with both survivor's guilt and a genuine existential threat. But Finn displays imagination and ingenuity rather then mere homages. His film's most effective sequences are based on relatable fears, with the standout involving a public speaking engagement that takes a dark turn when Skye believes the teleprompter is conspiring against her. Elsewhere we get a sequence that exploits our fear of finding ourselves caught in the middle of one of those insufferable dancing flash mobs you see on social media.
It isn't entirely successful however. With a running time that passes the two hour mark, there are occasional lulls here. Halfway through we get an extended flashback to the accident that claimed Paul's life, but its placing feels redundant as it doesn't show us anything we haven't already assumed. When we realise just how much of the film consisted of hallucinations rather than reality, it leads us to ask some awkward questions regarding certain plot points. But these are merely occasional bumps in the road on a journey into the mind of a woman who was deeply troubled before the added burden of a metaphysical curse. And Scott's powerhouse performance is so compelling and energised that you won't have time to question what you're watching in the moment.
Directed by: Parker Finn
Starring: Naomi Scott, Kyle Gallner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Peter Jacobson, Raúl Castillo, Dylan Gelula
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