Keep on Smiling

Released in 2022, Smile is a deeply creepy and messed up movie. A film about a woman cursed by some kind of demonic force, pursued by people that give her very creepy smiles, all while her sense of reality keeps warping and changing and she can’t figure out what’s real and what’s just in her mind… it all amounts to a film that keeps you on your toes and never lets up. The thing about a film like that, though, is that once the basics of the concept are laid out, you have to think that you’ve seen all the games that can be played. How much can the demon mess with the protagonist before we’ve gone as far with the ideas as it can go.

That was an issue I foresaw with the sequel, released recently in 2024. We’ve seen what the demon can do, we know its games. Where exactly can the film series go from there when all the tricks are already revealed. And, honestly, the first half of this film struggles with that. It gives us a new protagonist (because it had to due to the end of the first film) who has her own struggles and her own backstory to work through, but at the same time the basic beats of the setup play out exactly the same. Sudden shocking death, smiling people, fucking up sense of reality, what’s real and what isn’t.

But then, about halfway in, the movie commits even harder and takes some narrative twists that push us far beyond the first film. That’s when the sequel justifies its own existence, giving us not just the same story but something that twists even further, goes even harder. Horror sequels can be hard to make since the formula is generally set in stone by the first movie, and while Smile 2 doesn’t push beyond the bounds of the formula, it does find a way to be more shocking, creepier, and more over the top, making it a fun rides to take all over again.

The film focuses on Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a famous pop star who is about to head out on a new world tour after a year in rehab after a massive car accident. The crash took the life of her then boyfriend, actor Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson), and left Skye with deep emotional scars, as well as some very obvious physical ones on her back and belly. Her year away forced her to get clean, but her history of drug use means that doctors won’t prescribe her anything harder than tylenol, and with her injured back, that just isn’t strong enough to take care of her pain.

That leads Skye to contact an old dealer she used to know, Lewis (Lukas Gage). What she couldn’t have known was that, six days earlier, Lewis witnessed the brutal murder of two drug dealers at the hands of Joel (Kyle Gallner, reprising his role from the previous film), and this caused the Smile entity (as it’s called) to be passed on to him. Stalked by the demon for a week, Lewis then gets taken over by the creature who then, in front of Skye, brutally kills Lewis by having him smash his own face in. Now Skye has the demon following her, and if she can’t find a way to get rid of it the thing will likely kill her as well.

Smile 2 is a film that plays within the bounds of the formula of the first movie. That film set the rules for the Smile entity, how it works, what its goals are, and how it transfers itself from person to person. The sequel doesn’t change any of that respecting the rules while coloring within the margins. It’s a film that doesn’t try to retcon and reinvent what’s working, which can be viewed as a strength (no sudden creative rewriting such as happened in every sequel in the Halloween series), instead relying on what we know and twisting those elements around to find a new story to tell.

This does lead to weakness in the first half of the film as Skye has to go through the same beats that we witnessed from our previous heroine, Sosie Bacon's Rose Cotter from the first film. This can be a little tedious since we already know what’s going to happen: she’s going to see a murder, she’ll then be stalked by creepy, smiling people, and then slowly her sense of what’s real and what isn’t will warp. And the film sticks to that, right up through the first two acts of the film, leading me to wonder if the film really had anything new to say.

It does, and that all comes in the last act of the film when the movie decides to commit and go way off the rails in the best kind of way. I obviously can’t spoil things without ruining the movie, and Smile 2 has only been out for a few months (at the time of this writing) so I don’t want to do that. Suffice it to say, though, that the film commits hard to the idea that Skye really can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake anymore, with the demon truly messing with her mind and making her question everything. It’s a great way to handle the material we know in a fresh way, and it absolutely makes for a mind-bending last act.

Even here, though, I do have some concerns. On the one hand, an act like this makes you want to go back and try to figure out what’s real and what’s fake. It makes you question everything you watched, and that can lead to some solid rewatch potential for the film. At the same time, though, the act also feels like a rug pull. It’s a trick that can only be pulled once, and after this it’ll be hard to get the audience to trust anything ever again. We already saw that from the first film into this one, knowing what the demon can do and questioning every moment. How much farther is that going to go from this film into some potential sequel and, of course, can you even keep the audience on board at that point.

I suppose these are good problems to have going forward with the series, and the creator, Parker Finn, does intend to keep going with the series after the rousing success of Smile 2 ($138 Mil made on a $28 Mil budget). But it does speak to the issues a concept like this can have. The audience has to be brought along for the ride each time, and the twistier and more unexpected the ride gets, the more the audience will expect the unexpected. It works here, this early in the series, because there was really only one direction to go with the sequel: bigger. But bigger can only take you so far and, at a certain point, you can’t push the concept much bigger without it breaking.

The ending of Smile 2 (which, again, I won’t spoil) leads to a massive twist that could redefine the series. But if the next film, whatever it is, ends up giving us a similar reprise of Smile and Smile 2’s early beats, then it’s going to speak to a major weakness of the films. I was on board this time because the concept hasn’t been beaten into the ground and the late game twists were really good. But from this point forward the franchise is going to have to work to keep me invested. Smile 2 is a solid enough sequel that I enjoyed the ride, but I can already tell we’re starting to hit some rough patches. Will a third film be able to pull these tricks, and new ones, again? We’ll have to see. But from where I’m sitting, it’ll be hard for the new stuff to outweigh the weaknesses the formula is already showing.