Great horror sequels succeed because they don’t just rinse and repeat the first movie. Instead, they see the untapped potential of the opening chapter and amplify it. It’s why A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and Aliens were able to scuttle out of the shadows of their elder siblings. Astoundingly, Smileseries creator Parker Finn takes the intriguing but somewhat prosaically expressed conceit of his 2022 surprise smash and makes Smile 2 bigger and scarier in all the right ways.
That the opening follows burned out cop Joel (Gallner), the sole survivor of the first Smile, shows that Finn knows how to connect the films – but then he takes a brilliant and gory left turn into the pampered world of pop star Skye Riley (Scott). She’s heading to the comeback trail with a new look and a powerful “overcoming tragedy” narrative that she gets to run through on The Drew Barrymore Show. Scott’s Riley is a little Dua Lipa in flashbacks, with more of a damaged “Wrecking Ball”-era Miley Cyrus feel when the film – and the malevolent, grinning, deceptive force known as the Monstrosity – catch up with her. However, how does a recently sober pop star recovering from the car crash that killed her actor boyfriend (Nicholson) convince anyone that she’s being chased by a demon that wears the face of everyone around her, contorted into a bizarre grin, and will make her kill herself in seven days?
Writer/director Finn throws the audience deep into the instantly recognizable world of modern celebrity, with Riley navigating creepy fans, her business-minded momager (the ever-excellent DeWitt, The Boys, Your Sister’s Sister), a loyal but infuriating PA (Gutierrez-Riley, superb in a minor role), and the pressures of being a one-woman multimillion-dollar business as expressed through the fawning head of her label (Castillo). But Finn marbles this all through with the Monstrosity’s power of deceit: Riley can’t trust anything she sees, and neither can the audience.
Just as Sosie Bacon gave the first film its sense of vibrating terror, this is Scott’s film, and she sets its high energy and twisted tone perfectly. Finn’s script and direction let all her charisma that was buried in the soulless live-action remake of Aladdin bubble to the surface, and she excels in that almost impossible challenge for any actor of plausibly playing a pop star. It almost never works, but Scott has those chops, as proven by how she slams through the songs, many of which she co-wrote with Idarose.
That contemporary pop energy is matched by the cunning eagerness to how returning cinematographer Charlie Sarroff moves his camera through the world of Smile with spins and twists that are both kinetic and vertiginous. It’s a graceful yet constantly uneasy POV that complements Riley’s always-in-motion song-and-dance career – after all, what’s a pop star without a gigantic son et lumière stage show? Finn understands the horrifying potential of dance in a way that recent films like Gaspar Noé’s gorgeous but heavy-handed Climax or Luca Guadagnino’s lead-footed Suspiria remake never really grasped. If anything, it feels like Finn is following the choreography of The Red Shoes, with Riley caught in a grisly pas de deux with the Monstrosity. Like every touring pop sensation, Riley has her own backing dancers, and when the Monstrosity starts using their unified group presence against her, the result is one of the most entertainingly disturbing scenes in modern horror.
It feels like no coincidence that Smile 2 comes so hot on the heels of the surprise success of unrated gorefest Terrifier 3. Both franchises began as freewheeling riffs of established genres, with Terrifier revamping the seemingly moribund slasher and Smile westernizing some of the tropes of post-Ringu J-horror. However, in the sequels – unlike Freddy’s Revenge or Aliens – their creators have retained essential creative control, and taken exciting leaps in mythology and world-building. This is the antithesis of a sequel for sequel’s sake. Instead, it’s second verse, even catchier than the first.
This article appears in October 18 • 2024.
