Movie Review: 'Smile 2' Leaves No Smile for this Critic

Smile 2

Directed by Parker Finn

Written by Parker Finn

Starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie Dewitt, Kyle Gallner, Lukas Gage

Release Date October 18th, 2024

Published October 18th, 2024

Smile 2 stars Naomie Scott as troubled pop star Skye Riley. Fresh out of rehab, and one year removed from a car accident that killed her movie star boyfriend, Paul (Ray Nicholson), Skye is re-entering public life and launching a new tour and record. It’s not an easy time, Skye is still struggling with back pain from the accident while also undergoing grueling hours of choreography for the tour. With that in mind, she’s secretly been visiting a former High School friend turned high end drug dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage). Lewis is hooking her up with Vicodin to help her work through her pain.

In need of a new supply, Skye arranges to go to Lewis’ apartment but what she finds there is a completely unhinged Lewis who is seeing something that only he can see. Sweating, screaming, and panicking, Lewis goes on to kill himself right in front of Skye by smashing his own face in with a barbell weight. It’s shocking and graphic, and worse yet for Skye, it’s the result of a curse that was passed to Lewis and is now passed to Skye. This curse causes the subject to slowly unravel mentally until they too end up killing themselves and passing the curse to someone who witnesses their death.

We know this because we’ve seen Smile 1 where Sosie Bacon gave the curse to Kyle Gallner who, in a cameo to start this film, passes the curse to Lewis after failing to pass it to a far worse drug dealer. Gallner’s character connects the two films but if you are expecting him to stick around and provide context for the new victim, prepare to be disappointed, the Smile curse isn’t playing around and Gallner’s Joel is not going to be around all that long. Exposition regarding the Smile curse will eventually be handled by Morris (Peter Jacobson) via plot convenience.

Soon, Skye begins seeing strange and uncanny faces, twisted, disturbed smiles that are deeply unsettling. Slowly her delusions begin to grow in proportion and the people around her, including her mother, played by Rosemarie Dewitt, and best friend, Gemma, played by Dylan Gelula, chalk her behavior up to a possible relapse. This isolates Skye from help, causing her to slip further and further into her growing delusional state. Only plot convenience Morris can give her any hope for surviving this curse. Not only is he great for exposition, he might be key to a possible happy ending.

Morris is a problem for me. He knows so much about the Smile demon/curse and yet he’s not experienced it, he’s merely received second hand information via a family member who ended up dead. He’s also far from being a main character which means centering so much of the plot of the film on him throws the plot out of balance. Skye is our main character and since she can’t tell the difference between reality and her tormented delusions, we’re left with no objective reality to grab onto. This is likely on purpose, writer-director Finn Parker perhaps wants us to be off-kilter, but the effect for me came at the cost of my investment in any particular part of the plot of Smile 2. What if Morris isn't real either? What is real? What isn't? Is there any hope for Skye or is it all just a grim march to horrific death?

Without a baseline reality, it’s hard to know what Skye may or may not be losing as she descends into madness. This is a particular problem in the final act when the movie enacts a series of rug pulls, none of which may have actually happened, leaving only the experience of a series of disconnected scares. And then, the movie ends and I was left feeling empty, a void of nothingness. You might find the ending shocking or whatever, but I was simply bummed out because I wanted something more, something more satisfying, more appropriate for the rather remarkable performance that Naomi Scott is giving in Smile 2.

Indeed, I may not be a huge fan of the way the plot of Smile 2 is assembled but I loved Naomi Scott’s performance. She’s really great in Smile 2 and that makes it all the more disappointing that the movie lets her performance down in the end. Scott is selling the hell out of every jump scare, every new twist in her growing disengagement with reality. She has a really compelling backstory as a major pop star recovering from drugs and tragedy and instead of building on that using the curse to underline and augment that journey via a horror plot, we get a loose configuration of well staged scares that add up to next to nothing by the end.

The final act of Smile 2 is so disappointing that even a really great lead performance can’t redeem it. I get what director Parker Finn is going for but that doesn’t make me like it or appreciate it. He really had something working with Naomi Scott’s wonderful performance but his desire to reach a very specific conclusion meant negating that performance in favor of one final, deeply unsatisfying shock. I’m being as vague as I possibly can, I don’t want to spoil the ending. My issues with Smile 2 are highly subjective, you might like the choice that Parker Finn made. I didn’t and thus I don’t care for Smile 2.

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