About to embark on a new world tour, global pop sensation Skye Riley begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events. Overwhelmed by the escalating horrors and the pressures of...
Just like its predecessor, I believe “Smile 2” showed potential to be just as good, if not greater, than the sum of its parts and while I do maintain this smile isn’t quite ready to fade, its litany of annoyances are valid enough to where it’s hard to recommend this to someone who isn’t EXTREMELY patient with it.
Parker Finn remains both surefooted and committed in executing a vision that doesn’t feel like more of the same. Of course it’s his baby and he can’t help overdoing the pampering of its diaper, but he justifies his passive-aggressive penchant for emotional claustrophobia with measured confidence.
So much about the setting I just adore: taking the sanitized, stylized imagery of superstardom and explicitly framing a very old-fashioned 2000’s-like torture device to take on a hallucinatory quality that very well matches the heightened sense of delusion, commodification and confinement with its production design. If both film’s open-ended sets portrayed two different types of prison, this one wins out by being the most smothering and unnerving. For all its hellish potential, its biggest win is just how natural the budding style buoys its hive-mind presentation.
Charlie Sarroff once again delivers gripping camerawork that’s as creepily captivating as before, increasing the films eerie ambience with fastidious but awkward editing. The larger budget is utilized well to expand the necessary scope and scale it wants, pacing barely avoids sacrificing momentum for the sake of thrills while Cristobal Tapia de Veer's score does better at being gloomy and accentuating suspense than most horror films I’ve seen all year. Constant variety and experimentation with different horror sounds do wonders for the sound design and with violence this repulsive, the R-rating makes damn sure to drill into your brain. The slight unease of goofy grimace bleeding together felt like an accident waiting to happen but it never slips too far.
Besides, tone in media and fiction really is arbitrary when you come to think of it.
In particular, acting is commendable on all fronts with a dominant supporting cast, and anchored by a ferocious Naomi Scott giving the performance of her life. Genuinely one of the best performances I’ve seen all year further bolstered by characterization more astute than Sosie Bacon’s character.
On paper, I really shouldn’t be on board with this sequel since it repeats all the same beats from the first film: exact same twists, exact same explanations, the same dirge-like inevitable strumming of hopelessness and its addiction demon metaphor being nothing new. The only difference is instead of following a therapist fixating on hyper-vigilance to burrow through life in a profession that helps as much as it hurts, we instead follow a pop star delivering a much-promised comeback tour following traumatic physical injuries and making amends with those she alienated through substance abuse. It’s definitely too standard issue to keep an idea like that ambiguous for long and pieces of that foundation get chipped away en route to the finish line…but the teeth it bares are so deceptively addictive, it’s not entirely a crime to ignore those bells.
Every scene is either feeding into or a result of the never-ending exercise of image management and the hothouse it creates for anyone unfortunate enough to be melted by it; very easy to blur those lines of control, psychosis, grief and addiction and when bridged across by the excellent opening tying the two films together, Parker understands how there’s pain behind every smirk. It feels like an effort to expand on the ideas of the hit first movie instead of just repeating them; at least for the first hour in change, how it carries out it’s predetermined stages of events are fairly unpredictable and the rest of it barely avoids shooting your immersion full of more holes than Swiss cheese. Even as it loses momentum in the second act, its relentless devotion to blending the best of elevated horror with situational awareness still leaves an invigorating level of stress.
Also, props to Finn for not exploiting mental health as a cheap plot device. He could’ve just left the change at the switch in protagonists and half-ass it to the bank but he knew better than that.
Unfortunately, novel premise clashing with the base demands of horror shovelware normally leads to the latter winning out without fail, leading to a litany of the same issues from before. Scares remain as repetitive and tiresome as they did the first time around, dialogue comes across as very samey and hand-holdy and it’s ridiculously overextended at 127 minutes long (although that problem lies in the pacing near the end).
Speaking of….yeah, that also ties into the ending because I don’t know how to feel that.
I understand the intention behind the whole “you can’t trust anybody” mantra and it leads to one hell of a final scene but the way we got there was boggling to the mind. Its biggest detriment is how big of a cheat it feels. You can kinda tell they weren’t entirely sure how to get to the ending they wanted so they doubled down on as many shortcuts they could allow, essentially devaluing this rug-pulling mindfuck with each use. It’s not like Late Night with the Devil where any of its discordant pieces still form a whole complete puzzle; even if the point was to leave intrigue for more (which it still succeeded in), they circled back to the more safe and predictable ending without truly justifying the journey.
So…yeah. While hardly subtle, enough dental work is done here to leave you crooked grinning up to, at least, one ear.
