Jonah Naplan   October 19, 2024

Parker Finn’s “Smile 2” is one of those great movies so bombastic that if you tried to describe it to a friend, they might think you made it all up. And you may as well have because the movie never has you confident about what’s real and what’s an illusion, testing the viewer’s patience and probing them to go insane. A sequel to the surprise hit “Smile” from 2022, this film is bigger and better, expanding the world set up by its predecessor, and going fully over-the-top in ways most other modern horror movies would be terrified to. It’s anchored by a show-stopping performance from Naomi Scott, who will stand out as one of the strongest horror heroines of the 2020s, and a spectacularly eerie sound design that not only makes for one of the scariest studio horror movies of the decade but one of the very best films of the year.

You don’t need to have seen the prior “Smile” movie to enjoy this one, but it will help you appreciate where this story is coming from and what’s ultimately at stake. The film opens six days after the conclusion of the last outing on Joel (Kyle Gallner), who’s been infected with the same insidious parasite that plagued Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon). After breaking into a drug deal, he inadvertently passes it on to a corrupt young man named Lewis (Lukas Gage), who will do his own part in carrying on the tradition soon enough. His victim is pop music star Skye Riley (Scott), who has recently resurfaced in the public eye after suffering major injuries related to a brutal car crash that killed her boyfriend Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson, Jack’s remarkably identical son). When Skye, who has buried her pain in drugs and substances, goes to buy from Lewis’s apartment one fateful night, she watches in horror as he begins to go crazy, and then picks up a heavy weight and smashes his face to pieces. He does it all with a disgusting, shiny grin.

Skye will now begin to see this smile everywhere she goes, plastered on the faces of those she’s closest to, like her all-business mother Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), personal assistant Josh (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) and best friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula). She has horrible, terrifying visions that haunt her when she’s asleep and when she’s awake and hallucinations about the carnage of the car accident and Lewis’s demise, gets tossed and thrown around like a rag doll as she’s haunted and attacked by imaginary demons assuming the physique of everyday people and, most destructively, questions her life and role as a celebrity.

Naomi Scott delivers such an excellent performance in a movie that is largely a one-woman-show. Like Bacon in the last “Smile” movie, she’s powerful without being showy or at all pompous, inhabiting the part with gravitas and an uneasiness that is contagious. Scott joins the ranks of other such effective horror heroines from this year like Maika Monroe in “Longlegs” and Cailee Spaeny in “Alien: Romulus” by never falling subject to the character tropes this genre usually reserves for women. Instead, she infuses the role with smarts and a pained vulnerability that allows us an inside look on a character who has witnessed and felt intense tragedy and is now working her way to redemption. “Smile 2” puts Scott through the wringer, never giving her a moment to breathe. It’s so nice to finally see a modern horror film that makes its lead endure such furious physical and mental exhaustion, but puts them in a compelling, super-competent movie in exchange.

More than compelling: “Smile 2” is one of the most genuinely scary movies I’ve seen in the last few years. Sometimes it slips and makes that modern genre mistake of overly relying on gore effects to be shocking, but most of the thrills are creative and earned, using atmosphere and an expert pace to be satisfying. Where Finn could have easily taken a cheap route and thrown at us a scare a minute, he waits for the perfect moment and catches the audience off-guard. The “Smile” franchise is the only contemporary series I can think of that isn’t confined by the mold; it’s subversive and forward-thinking, drawing doodles around the margins instead of remaining inside them. There are so many brilliant large and small-scale set pieces here, between a litany of frights in Skye’s apartment when she’s all alone, and an equal number of terrors when she’s surrounded by a large group. It’s fascinating to watch a director get to play around however he chooses with such a big budget (by horror movie standards) and experiment with different locations and circumstances.

Finn also has something to say about celebrity culture and how our favorite stars are too often forced to bottle their emotions up and put on a happy face for the crowd and the cameras instead of being genuine as humans and transparent with their fans. His message feels sincere instead of manipulative, a window into an industry that commends beauty rather than an honest heart. Depicting this sentiment in a horror movie is an intriguing card to play, and gives us something to chew on afterwards instead of terminating at the immediate level of the end credits.

As the first movie did, “Smile 2” makes use of the same expression typically reserved for affection as an emblem of fear. That a toothy grin is so familiar to us is precisely what makes it so scary. And yet, these particular smiles are anything but familiar; they’re pained and intense, completely unnatural and haunting. Finn contradicts their meaning by depicting them as symbols of fear rather than warmth. It makes the “Smile” franchise arguably scarier than any other series dealing with cursed dolls or ghosts or aliens that can hear but not see you.

This is one of those enthralling, out-of-body movies. It makes you feel things, heavy things, but can’t quite be described like anything else. Its many facets ultimately amount to a vivid commentary on celebrity ethics and open up a dialogue about an industry with priorities that are morally corrupt in one way or another. The real horror, which lies just under a facade of allegorical frights, is how many willing minions the institution holds in its snare. Celebrities, like smiles, can shock and surprise you.

Now playing in theaters.