127 min | R | October 18, 2024 | Paramount Pictures
Parker Finn takes his Smile franchise and makes the rare horror sequel that improves on the original in every way. Naomi Scott gives a star-making performance as a pop star losing her mind.
Skye Riley is a global pop star about to launch a world tour. She is recovering from a car accident that killed her boyfriend and left her addicted to painkillers. She witnesses a man kill himself with a grotesque smile on his face. The curse from the first film has found a new host. Skye begins experiencing hallucinations that blur the line between reality and psychosis. Parker Finn takes the concept of the first Smile and transplants it into the world of celebrity and fame. The metaphor is sharper this time. The smile is the performance. The curse is the industry that demands you perform happiness while destroying yourself. Finn understands that the pop star is the perfect vessel for this horror because she is already performing sanity for an audience.
Naomi Scott plays Skye with a ferocity that transforms what could have been a standard horror sequel into a character study. She is physically committed to the deterioration. The panic attacks. The paranoia. The moments where she cannot tell if the person in front of her is real. Scott carries the film on sheer force of performance. Rosemarie DeWitt plays Skye’s mother and manager with a controlling warmth that is its own kind of horror. She loves her daughter and she needs her daughter to perform and the film does not pretend those two things are compatible. Kyle Gallner returns briefly from the first film. Lukas Gage, Dylan Gelula, and Ray Nicholson populate the supporting cast with sharp work.
Finn and cinematographer Charlie Sarroff create a visual language that uses the iconography of pop stardom as horror imagery. The arena lights become threatening. The backup dancers become uncanny. The mirror-filled dressing rooms become spaces where identity fractures. The camera work is more confident than the first film. Finn holds shots longer and lets the dread build. The jump scares are earned through composition rather than sound design alone. The production design of Skye’s world is sleek and expensive and claustrophobic. The score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer integrates pop music sensibility with horror atmosphere.
The first Smile was a competent horror film with a good concept. This sequel is a genuinely ambitious one. Finn expands the mythology without overexplaining it. The ending is bold and committed to the logic of the curse. The film is too long in its middle section and some of the hallucination sequences repeat their effect. But the central performance and the thematic sharpness elevate it beyond franchise horror. Finn has found something real inside his commercial concept. The smile is the mask we wear. The curse is what happens when the mask becomes the face.