Skye Riley is in trouble. One year after a near-fatal car crash, which exposed her mental health and substance abuse issues for all to see, the newly humbled pop sensation (Naomie Scott) solemnly swears herself to sobriety on The Drew Barrymore Show as part of the PR campaign for her impending comeback tour. Not long afterward, she winds up in the apartment of drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), in search of Vicodin to ease the lingering pain of her injuries. Something is off about Lewis — deeply off — beneath his apparent coked-out hysteria; unbeknownst to her, but not to us, he is the latest target of a malevolent monster, visible only to the unfortunate spectator whose mind it has managed to infect. Skye watches in petrified horror as the man — moved by something a little more powerful than cocaine — picks up a 35lb weight and uses it to cave his own face in, smiling all the while, even as his jaw splinters open and falls to the floor in pieces. Her first impulse is to call for help, but we know just as well as she does that this is not an option. She flees into the night, carrying with her the mental stowaways of guilt, trauma, and something unimaginably worse.
Though it probably spoke more to the state of the genre at the time, Parker Finn’s sleeper hit Smile — whose winking narrativization of the “About Trauma” strain in recent horror was merely pretense for a mean, brutish, and defiantly stupid meat-and-potatoes shocker — felt refreshing circa 2022. Its new sequel, the unceremoniously titled Smile 2, is essentially dead-on-arrival. Outclassed on all sides by neighboring releases like Trap (pop stars in De Palmian peril), Oddity (mirthless punishments inflicted on shallow tempters of fate), and The First Omen (cash-grabs as cover for stylistic showboating), Finn’s follow-up is all too happy to repackage its predecessor’s jolts and rug-pulls. Limping its merry way through more than two hours of conceptual redundancy, Smile 2 is the kind of preeningly self-conscious genre movie that cancels out nearly every effect it seeks to elicit.
As the film sands away the remnants of Skye’s sanity (and personality) with sequences of escalating public humiliation, it becomes increasingly clear that Finn’s interests lie more with the psychological pressures of celebrity than with the mechanics and lore of the “Smile Curse.” If only his stylistically labored combination of the two yielded any genuine paranoia beyond the realm of caricature and abjection; Skye spends the film navigating a cynical rotary of stifling concern, taunting recollection, elaborate hallucination, and combinations therein — some of them creative, few of them frightening. Her manager mom (Rosemary DeWitt), pushy benefactor (Raúl Castillo), and bootlicking gay manservant (Miles Gutiérrez-Riley) take turns nagging on her nerves and plying her with VOSS water, and an estranged confidante (Dylan Gelula) re-enters the picture with a friendly face that Skye latches onto like a lifeline. Scott milks the scraps of character she’s given for all their worth, but Finn’s camera reduces her (knowingly and gleefully, of course) to a completely passive figure, a doll being dismembered by the bad kid on the block.
Much more than fame-as-meat-grinder or trauma-as-consumable-spectacle, Finn’s alignment of his own authorial power with that of his grinning creation is the film’s main subject. As it finally reaches a home stretch of gotchas and fake-outs, the director’s mocking spirit shines through; Smile 2 reveals itself as (even more than its similarly sadistic prequel) an extended joke about a filmmaker’s ability to upend reality at our expense whenever they feel so inclined. The final punchline is exactly what you’d expect it to be, and any finesse in its delivery is eclipsed by the sheer relish it takes in being so obvious. As trends (thankfully, and consciously) shift away from “elevation” back toward exploitation, the noxious, bragging schlock of Finn’s film feels at once dishonest and predetermined. Blurring the lines between autocritique and autofellatio, between playing with your food and spitting it back out on the plate, Smile 2 can’t even make a proper show of its deafening deficiencies. It’s as morbidly watchable as it is totally interminable, self-defeating and self-congratulating in equal measure.
DIRECTOR: Parker Finn; CAST: Naomi Scott, Kyle Gallner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Dylan Gelula; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 18; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 7 min.
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