Fright-film followup expands its finely crafted creepiness into the world of a traumatized pop superstar
Smile 2
Starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie Dewitt, Lukas Gage & Dylan Gelula
Directed by Parker Finn
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Oct. 18
A pop superstar begins having terrifying visions as she mounts an ambitious concert tour. Is she losing her mind, having alarming flashbacks from a troubled time in her life? Or is she infected by a vile demonic entity that feeds on human trauma?
If you saw the first Smile in 2022, you already know the answer. This masterfully nasty little house of horrors takes the premise of the first flick and lets it play out through a nightmarish new scenario with a troubling subtext about the high pressures—and high personal price—of fame.
As the singing superstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) tries to hold onto her sanity, she’s haunted by jarring memories of a horrific car crash—and freaked out by seeing people staring at her with crazed, malicious grins. Terrible things start happening around her, like the cokehead drug dealer (Euphoria’s Lukas Gage) who smashes his smiling face to a bloody pulp with a barbell weight.
It turns out the evil entity “replicates” people you know, and people you don’t, making you question reality before giving you a lethal “smile” of your own.
You never know what’s going to happen next, what’s lurking in the darkness, or when that evil grin is going to reappear. But when it does, it’s bad news. The movie mixes bloody shocks and “body horror” with the idea that witnessing, or experiencing, awful things can leave lasting impressions in your grey matter. It’s no wonder one of Skye’s hit songs is “I Want a New Brain.”
Returning director Parker Finn does another fine job of diving into the crazy swirl of this shock-filled disturbia spiked with jolting violence, jarring jump scares and the constant low hum of unbridled dread. More than once, we hear a character say, “This is f*cked up!” Indeed it is, in the way that well-crafted scary movies can really get under your skin.
Veteran actress Rosemary DeWitt plays Skye’s drill-sergeant stage mom, setting the stage for Scream 2’s return to the monstrous “mommy issues” of its predecessor. Drew Barrymore’s cameo, as the host of her real-life TV show on which Skye appears as a guest, might make you remember her breakthrough role in Scream in 1996, which is credited with revitalizing the horror-movie genre. Dylan Gelula had a freaky nocturnal encounter with Nicholas Cage in the mind-bending Dream Scenario.
But it’s Naomi Scott who channels all the horror in the mad, mad world in which her character finds herself trapped, dealing with her own toxic traumas. You may have seen the British actress singing and co-starring as Princess Jasmine alongside Will Smith in the Disney live-action remake of Aladdin back in 2019. She totally crushes her role here as a another kind of princess, a pop idol, playing stadium shows and trying to hold it together while her world tips upside down, inside out and out of control. (The movie does a great job of adding an even higher level of queasy creepiness to the often-uncomfortable encounters celebrities have with deep-dish fans.)
The movie kinda jumps the shark at the end, when it goes all-out for gross-out. But it introduces us to a new scream queen, once a Disney princess, and it reminds me of a song—the Temptations’ hit of 1971, “Smiling Faces,” in which the Motown group cautions listeners that smiling faces can mask lies. But the group probably didn’t know that, a half century later, unnerving grins can also mess you up for life…or what’s about to be left of it.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 