Director/Screenplay – Parker Finn, Producers – Marty Bowen, Parker Finn, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner & Robert Salerno, Photography – Charles Sarroff, Music – Cristobal Tapia de Veer, Visual Effects Supervisor – Robert Bock, Visual Effects – Cadence Effects (Supervisor – Craig Crawford), CBS VFX (Supervisor – Martin Hall) & Rodeo FX (Supervisor – Matthew Dupuis), Special Effects Supervisor – Johann Kunz, Monstrosity Effects – Alec Gillis, Makeup Effects – Monsters in My Closet FX (Designer – Jeremy Selenfriend), Production Design – Lester Cohen. Production Company – Temple Hill.
Cast
Naomi Scott (Skye Riley), Rosemarie DeWitt (Elizabeth Riley), Lukas Gage (Lewis Fregoli), Miles Gutierrez-Riley (Joshua), Peter Jacobson (Morris), Dylan Gelula (Gemma), Kyle Gallner (Joel), Ray Nicholson (Paul Hudson), Raul Castillo (Darius), Drew Barrymore (Herself)
Plot
Skye Riley is a highly successful pop star. She had to pull out of her last tour following an accident in which her boyfriend Paul Hudson was killed, which led her into a spiral of drug and alcohol abuse. She is now about to embark on a new tour. Despite insisting to everyone that she is clean, Skye sneaks away from the control of her mother Elizabeth and manager Joshua to get some Vicodin from her dealer Lewis Fregoli. However, Lewis has been infected with the smile viral curse and batters his brains out with a barbell weight in front of her. A frightened Skye flees the scene but then discovers that she has been infected with the smile and that her sense of reality is starting to fall apart.
Smile (2022) was a sleeper success. Originally made as a short film, director Parker Finn was given funding to expand it to feature-length. The film ended up earning a surprise $217 million worldwide. Smile 2 is a sequel and similarly earned a not immodest $136 million worldwide.
You can hardly blame Parker Finn and Temple Hill for immediately leaping into making Smile 2 and trying to launch a potential new horror franchise for the 2020s. This is made somewhat difficult by the lack of real explanations for what the smile is. Smile 2 tries to add something about the smile being a Parasite but the explanations stretch plausibility. Mindedly, the Final Destination series ground out five films while being as vague as possible when it comes to explanations about why anything was happening.
That said, you cannot deny that Parker Finn delivers the goods a second time around. He displays a confident assurance that is well above that of some seasoned directors of genre material. The prologue, announced as taking place ‘Six Days Later’, follows Kyle Gallner from the first film as he tries to pass on the curse to bad people, all of which proceeds to go wrong, before the sequence ends with an unexpected jolt. This certainly wakes the show up in a big way.
Naomi Scott gets a smile from a stranger in the mirror
As the main parts of Smile 2 opened, the centring of the drama around Naomi Scott as a modern pop singer failed to do much for me – I kept being reminded through much of the film of Saleka Night Shyamalan in Trap (2024) from two months earlier in the year. The travails of a mega-star recovering from addiction issues and being overworked by her schedule did nothing for me, while Naomi’s performance felt neurotic rather than one that engages your sympathy. If nothing else, this is something that places Smile 2 into a very different territory than Smile, even if what we have still does the sequel standard of offering the same but slightly different.
On the other hand, from about the point that Parker Finn has Lukas Gage standing and bashing himself in the forehead with a barbell weight until his face is a bloody pulp. Smile 2 starts to get a hold on you. Not long after, Naomi Scott is looking at herself in the mirror as a bloody figure stands behind her and then with a jolt abruptly reaches out to stretch her mouth into a smile. The one scene that made me quite impressed with what Parker Finn is capable of doing is the one where Naomi Scott is in her hotel suite and is attacked by possessed members of her dance troupe who all advance as one along a narrow hallway, climbing on top of each other until they are reaching up to the ceiling.
