WWhen “Smile,” an original, low-budget horror film, became a surprise hit in 2022, it was a success story that was easier to admire than a film to unite behind. Originally intended for a streaming premiere, the $17 million film was released in theaters after enthusiastic test screenings and grossed $217 million worldwide, a big win for Paramount and the genre as a whole. It was a deft, stylishly crafted attempt to update a familiar supernatural curse formula with the modern addition of a trauma narrative, a parasitic demon acting as a metaphor for the horror of inherited mental illness.

The film's creator, Parker Finn, showed talent as a director but had weaknesses as a writer. Unable to push his tonally awkward film far enough out of the shadows of “The Ring” and “It Follows,” he struggled with subtexts that required a bit more finesse to edit as deeply as his more effective, visceral use of gore . A sequel was inevitable, but it's also hard to imagine how it could in any way justify enduring the same hellish ordeal for another unfortunate victim.

But in Smile 2, Finn has found a clever way to reframe his situation, going from a psychiatrist haunted by his involvement in the death of her abusive mother to a pop star also haunted by the death of her actor boyfriend and her Drug and alcohol addiction may have played a role. The curse remains the same – someone kills themselves smiling in front of you and then it's you who is plagued with visions of creepy, grinning people in your life for six days until you end your life too. The previous film ended with the protagonist's suicide in front of her lover, who comes back for a clever cold that ties the two films together.

The message is passed on to drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), who is contacted one night by the desperate Skye Riley (British actress Naomi Scott), a fallen pop singer about to embark on a sassy comeback tour that always still weakened from both physical injuries and emotional pain from a car accident a year earlier. She is otherwise sober but relies on Vicodin and needs a boost. But when she gets to Lewis, it becomes clear that something is wrong, and what she initially attributes to excessive cocaine use, she then sees as something else when Lewis brutally kills himself in front of her eyes. Aware of the damage her involvement would do to her career, Skye flees the scene, but soon she is haunted by something far worse than guilt…

It's a blessed time both for films centered around pop stars (the film joins Trap and The Idea of ​​You this year; 2025 gives us Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary) and for horror films centered around focusing on the hell of being a famous woman (he comes right after The Substance). I'm not sure “Smile 2” really adds much to an experience we're new to (fame = lonely, fans = offensive, moms = annoying), but it does provide a nice, well-used backdrop for a horror movie about it to lose your mind. The decadent disintegration of a celebrity is reminiscent of genre classics of the late 70s and 80s such as “The Eyes of Laura Mars” and “The Fan”. The pressures and expectations of being in the public eye serve to heighten the anxiety as Skye tries to maintain a sunny, camera-ready personality while being plagued by grotesque visions. The world of celebrities in the film also seems largely believable – the music is convincingly suitable for radio, Skye's changing identity as a pop star is visually clear, Drew Barrymore plays Drew Barrymore in a talk show scene – even if they couldn't pull it off in Madison Square Garden for playing ball ( Skye's big concert takes place at Herald Square Garden). Finn also has a strange obsession with the power of a Voss water bottle, which goes beyond product placement into confusing, important areas of plot (a quick look at the company's Instagram stories suggests some sort of undetermined partnership).

The forced full-toothed smile, cleverly used again in a large-scale advertising campaign, still remains oddly creepy to me, but the violence is shockingly repulsive. (With this film, the successful return of the Saw films and the birth of the Terrifier franchise, we seem to be entering the mainstream cruelty of late 2000s torture porn.) As with the first film, there's still a slight unease between grim and silliness , and nothing Although the film here competes with the absurdly cartoonish awfulness of the heroine's indifferent boyfriend in “Smile,” saying something about trauma, suicide and addiction in the subdued style of a serious film doesn't always work for Finn, if something far The next scene is more silly. Scott is an incredibly committed scream queen who goes back to hell over and over again, but even she struggles with the screaming, gun-wielding pantomime of the final act.

Finn also cheats a few too many times by relying on the demon's power to expand, border on the infinite, and be exploited to such an extent that it feels like we're watching one long dream sequence (the movie is a The film is unforgivably overstretched at 127 minutes) and despite these narrative tricks it fails to distract us from what is essentially the same long, hopeless march as the first film. As stylish as these films may be, there's still not enough distinctive identity apart from their inspirations and not enough apart from the (very loud) sound and fury to give us hope that it's a story worth it is to be told again and again. There's an appealingly crazy, if entirely inevitable, final scene that will also inevitably lead to more, but the smiles are already starting to fade.