It’s a rough time to be a fake pop star in American horror. Just a few months ago, Lady Raven had the Philadelphia stop on her world tour marred by an elaborate, potentially insane plan to trap a serial killer in attendance at the show – and wound up having to take a more hands-on approach to crime-fighting. Now Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is experiencing the stress of delivering a much-promised comeback tour following a recent trauma and making amends with those she alienated through substance abuse, compounded by her haunting visions caused by witnessing the demonically-assisted suicide of an old friend (and drug dealer). Some brat summer this turned out to be.
The pop world is the perfect setting for Smile 2, Parker Finn’s follow-up to his unexpected Ring-ish horror smash from 2022. In that movie, the no-win rules of this demonic attachment were established: If you witness the death of someone momentarily possessed by this mostly-invisible demon with the telltale sign of a rictus grin, the curse jumps to you, causing reality-bending hallucinations until you, too, surrender to its quasi-suicidal whims, passing the curse along to a witness, and so the cycle perpetuates. Could this have something to do with the idea of… trauma?!
If that seems like well-trod territory, just think of how those sorts of buzzwords get flattened and then reinflated by the “relatable” pop-industrial complex. Fake smiles, emerging from trauma, and stylized imagery are the currency of Skye Riley’s realm, which is rarified enough to take on a hallucinatory quality even without the aid of a demon. Are those fans silently grinning because they’re struck dumb by their love, or is it something more sinister? Is that a real stalker in her midst, or is her mind just spinning out from an uncomfortable earlier encounter? Finn must understand the hellish potential of it all; his movie has plenty of set pieces where characters frantically claw their way through a waking nightmare, starting from a bravura single-take opening sequence that’s half horror, half propulsive action with a doomy punchline.
On the other hand, that sequence has fuck-all to do with pop music, mostly clearing a path from a shadier world of drug dealers to Skye’s higher-toned dabbling. She’s off cocaine, she’s off alcohol, but her year-ago car accident has left mental and physical scars – and persistent back pain that someone with her history of addiction can’t medicate as well as she’d like, especially as tour rehearsals strain her body. So she visits an old high school friend who should be able to deal her Vicodin; he accidentally prescribes her the smile-demon instead.
From this early point, much of the rest of Smile 2 is the same thing: Skye tries to keep it together until she demon-hallucinates something startling, freaks out, and causes the people around her to think and/or say: Are you using again? Some of these sequences are dynamite, like her hallucination of smiling fans performing a kind of demonic flash-mob dance routine in her Manhattan apartment. Some of them are nigh-interminable in their predictability, like Skye being forced to address a music-related charity. And they all give Scott the opportunity to explore an array of emotions ranging from wide-eyed horror to wider-eyed terror. The movie’s signature shot becomes Scott skittering backwards, leaning away from the camera while bugging out her eyes to stare straight into it.
Scott is an instantly likable presence who has the look of a sleek pop star down, but the movie seems cautious about satirizing or interrogating that image, instead focusing on, yes, her trauma. The explanations have a way of blowing up and shrinking down the movie’s best details, like the way Skye choke-chugs down full bottles of Voss water at a time, eventually designated (and neutralized) as a therapist-recommended coping strategy. Presumably for the sake of simplicity, the movie persistently reduces the team surrounding Skye to a sometimes-insensitive mom-ager (Rosemarie DeWitt), an obsequious assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), and her recently reconnected high-school bestie (a scene-stealing Dylan Gelula), which nonetheless doesn’t seem quite right; yes, pop stardom is probably isolating, but shouldn’t the movie be making more of the vast machinery that creates that isolation and could foster intense paranoia? Maybe this is tied up in the movie’s insistence on referring to a massive star endlessly rehearsing dance routines for a costume-laden kickoff show at Madison Square Garden as a “singer-songwriter.” It’s filled with so much ersatz sympathy for Skye that it’s weirdly credulous of the claims you’d typically get from a press release.
Failing that, shouldn’t a Ring-ripoff horror movie about a pop star losing her mind be a little more ghoulish fun? The first Smile movie had a dirgelike thrum of hopelessness beneath its irresistibly freaky hook, pushed forward by the confidence of its filmmaking. Finn’s craft in Smile 2 is no less impressive, but he’s using it to pull the same trick twice – or in the case of scenes where the rug gets pulled out from Skye and it turns out what she thought was real was not in fact real, the same trick 10 or 12 or 15 times. Whenever Scott threatens to work the movie up into a proper frenzy, Finn stops her dead in her tracks, convinced that by dwelling on the vague idea of trauma, he’ll find something more to say about it. The degree to which Smile 2 ultimately locks in step toward an ending that could have been predicted from the trailer, possibly from the logline, may be the most shocking thing about it. (It’s the kind of turn that might have made for a horror classic if it happened halfway through a 90-minute movie rather than at the end of a two-hour one.) There’s plenty to say about how making pop music can represent simultaneous liberation and commodification, fantasy and delusion, catharsis and cynical advertising. Smile 2 ultimately seems struck dumb by its own possibilities, and gets stuck franchising hopelessness.
Director: Parker Finn
Writer: Parker Finn:
Starring: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Dylan Gelula, Miles Gutierrez-Riley
Release date: October 18, 2024
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.