2 out of 5

Directed by: Parker Finn

Essentially on par with the original Smile, Parker Finn’s followup suffers from achieving that levelness not by doing things exactly the same – this is quite a step up in attempted themes, and certainly in the visuals – but rather by taking steps both forward and back, progressing some surface level aspects and then backpedaling to some indulgences.

Taking place soon after Smile, the sequel jumps us right into the conceipt with a tensely executed oner: there’s an unseen entity being passed from person to person by witnessing a gruesome death; the perpetrator will sport a ghastly smile while / before committing the deed – sometimes upon themselves.

This has classified “the smile monster” as a chaos agent of sorts – committing atrocities just to do so – but when the curse is passed to pop superstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), writer / director Finn opens up exploring this is a more parasitic presence, tying its corruption upon a host’s psyche into the lack of self / agency we assume of spotlit celebrities.

The film already starts to lose some steps to overuse of cheap jump scares and cranked editing that works against Finn’s masterful, paced framing of scenes, and the way DP Charlie Sarroff links the slick visuals to the glamor of Shay’s stage life; but: once the handover is made, Finn uses the credit he earned from the former entry to slow roll the effects upon Shay, setting up some great sequences that make use of the smile monster’s trickery, and how the camera / frame can be used against us.

The jump scares continue, though, as do attempts to lore this into something more than a visual-fest, and neither one of these aspects work well when done en masse. Every quality shot comes with a moment that completely breaks the immersion, and the script simply isn’t there for adding to this “world” beyond some barebone basics I felt like I was already assuming, and character development for Skye that unfortunately / ironically doesn’t dig below some surface statements about idolatry and etc. Crawling this out to two hours cycles us through repeats of the above sin – pretty scene, predictable jump scare, Skye mentions feeling pressure – with, again, some choice shots and visuals that hold us in tow enough to continue. There’s eventually a good ante up of consequences in the last quarter of the flick, until Finn writes us into a corner where the stakes feel like they don’t matter much. The final scene could be leveraged into a good sequel jumping off point, though…

There’ve been positive remarks on Scott’s performance here. The role is a tough one, as it asks Scott to be at fever pitch nigh the entire time, and also isn’t very flattering – she’s visually frantic throughout, and Skye is incapable of being a “good” protagonist for us to cheer, plagued by both this internal and her external stresses. Scott absolutely manages that onslaught well throughout, but there’s some disconnect with the intensity of the violence she witnesses that undermines the spooky scenes a bit. Finn seems attached to (perhaps for budget reasons; perhaps a “reflection” theme) action-reaction edits that often screw with the pacing, padding some extra beats into responses. This combines with the rather staid gore – more on this in a moment – such that we’re watching two or three films at any given time: a drama; a thriller; a horror. …And they don’t exactly blend together, as presented.

Lastly, then, the gore. Smile 2 is pretty grisly, and there are some fantastically imagined clinical destructions of faces going on. But… there’s something with this era of horror gore where the camera is kind of locked off and static for the goopy stuff, making it feel oddly superficial. I don’t know if this is a preventative measure for lower budget movies and CG use, perhaps, or playing into an assumption that viewers want to see it all, but as with my other criticms here, it ends up being an immersion breaker. So it maybe looks super cool, and I do understand Finn was purposefully doing a bit where the victim startes right at the camera, but nonetheless, I would’ve taken something less graphic and abrupt for the sake of a more engrossing experience.