Enter Naomi Scott Smile 2.
Photo: Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection

Smile 2 has a really good idea, which is that the everyday life of a broken pop megastar is indistinguishable from the screaming terrors of a supernatural horror film. Whenever director Parker Finn pursues this idea, the film has a beautiful, confusing feel. The victims of horror films usually suffer in private, stalking through dark, empty houses, remote forests or abandoned corridors. Smile 2However, the superstar protagonist is constantly surrounded by people: followers, assistants, fans and gawkers. She suffers in front of the public, surrounded by people who could probably help. This turns out to be just as unsettling as an eerie lake or a cabin in the woods, and more metaphorically effective.

The film follows a few days in the life of global pop icon Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is back on stage after a period in rehab and an extended break due to a gruesome car accident that left her scarred and killed her actor boyfriend Paul stands (Ray Nicholson). But when her old friend and dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) puts on a sinister smile before gleefully smashing his head with a 35-pound weight plate, things go completely haywire. Skye begins to recognize Lewis’s figure around her, as well as that of the long-dead Paul. Most importantly, she sees the smile – that unsettling, unnatural, wide grin from the first film that tells us there may be some demonic possession afoot.

At his best, Smile 2 leaves us wondering whether Skye is haunted or just struggling with the craziness of the fandom. Is the sweaty, clingy creep who wants her to sign his t-shirt and won’t leave her alone a monster from beyond the grave or just your average stalker? What about her ever-supportive mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) or her submissive assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley)? Then there’s the fact that Skye is a recovering addict. (The only reason she’s seeing a dealer is because she’s not allowed prescription painkillers, but she’s still in pain from all of her surgeries after the accident.) Could the things following her be drug-related Act hallucinations? Okay, maybe “keep us guessing” is an exaggeration: we know the real answer to all of these questions, even if Skye doesn’t. Although the film is too much of a standard horror film to keep things unclear, it makes us think about how the fake smiles that surround celebrities aren’t all that different from the evil smiles that surround the protagonist victims Smile Franchise.

Director Finn has obviously thought about this and wisely doesn’t just rely on the narrative stages of the first picture. He made his directorial debut with this film, a surprise hit in 2022 that was an expansion of a short film he made two years earlier. But Smile It ran out of steam after establishing its clever premise of an invisible viral demon that put a disturbing grin on people’s faces before making them kill themselves. A world in which other people’s smiles become monstrous threats was a brilliant visual idea, one that had both an eerie immediacy and symbolic significance, but the film eventually lost itself in the predictable demands of a genre picture.

Unfortunately, Smile 2 is similarly torn between its novelistic premise and the basic requirements of horror. It’s hard not to watch Skye’s fast-paced reality and think of all the young non-fictional celebrities who have melted away before our eyes over the years: the Britneys, the Lindsays, the Amandas and Aarons, and others. And while Scott’s appropriately freaky performance is helpful, the film never really manages to make us care about Skye, in part because she’s a victim from the start and things never calm down long enough for us to get a sense of her as a victim could character. Much of the film’s empathy lies in the abstract, as Finn exaggerates Skye’s frayed consciousness. Just when we should be feeling something about their increasingly helpless situation, he hits us with ineffective jump scares – cheap, random, awkwardly telegraphed and accompanied by loud bangs and crashes on the soundtrack – and increasingly meaningless dream visions.

As in the first film, the director always relies on a certain approach: following a certain narrative path before revealing it – psychological! – It didn’t really happen. He wants it to be a hard thrill, but the more it happens, the more it devalues ​​everything we see. As Skye becomes increasingly unable to see what is actually happening and what is a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should empathize more with her. Instead, we lose interest as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a little cynical and cruel. The film ultimately defeats its own ambitions.