Smile 2

dir: Parker Finn

2025

Fucking hell. That was nasty.

Following on directly from the first movie, which I thought was pretty mid, this one feels like a significantly better flick than its predecessor, by dint of maybe having a bigger budget, but more so because it leans in to its premise of being an absolute fucking nightmare for the protagonist, even as it tries to find new ways to one up the Final Destination franchise.

The first flick, as best as I can remember, introduced its premise about some kind of supernatural entity that attaches itself to a person, torments them for about a week, then compels them to kill themselves in front of someone else, thus furthering the infection by transferring to a new host. It’s a somewhat laborious premise, and it’s been done a few times before already, and better, in many of those other cases. Many of them try to be more elaborate, or convoluted, or American, but they’re really all rip offs of the original Japanese Ringu saga. You watch the tape, Sadako comes and gets you, you die.

To fill out the running time, this iteration, which like I said earlier I think is significantly better than the first installment, has a tremendous performance from its lead, being Naomi Scott playing a pop starlet called Skye.

I think Skye is meant to not quite be at the Taylor Swift / Beyoncè level of superstardom, but she’s probably at the level just underneath them. Maybe the Sabrina Carpenter / Chappelle Roan / Charlie XCX level. Fantastically wealthy, dealing with the aftermath of a terrible car accident and the subsequent addiction issues, being bossed around by a terrifying stage mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), her life is tough, but for the next week of her life the Smile entity, for lack of a better descriptor, will make her life a living hell such that death itself might seem like sweet relief.

But it won’t be. Oh no.

This is not a horror flick that holds your hand, oh no it does not. It puts Skye (and therefore us) through the absolute fucking wringer, and it’s not like she deserves it at all. I mean, there are allusions made to the car accident that damaged her physically and mentally, which resulted in her boyfriend’s death, and maybe there’s a lot of guilt there.

But I’m telling you, once we’re shown the scene which leads up to the accident, wow, the little Baby Jesus himself would have murdered that motherfucker with his bare hands.

I have only seen the actor Ray Nicholson in two films, both this year, both fairly recently. Yes, he’s the son of the legend Jack Nicholson. He is too awful for this world. The characters he plays are radioactively awful, so appalling that he should be sectioned away from humanity and not allowed to appear on screen again. He should be painted in mirror-like paint such that we can’t see him again – his vocal chords must be removed. His curling eyebrows should be covered by modesty patches or gaffer tape or something.

To signal how fundamentally unfair the universe this film transpires within, Skye is the one tormented for two hours, and not Jack Nicholson’s supremely annoying child. Poor innocent blameless Skye. So she did some lines, so fucking what? Who amongst us, including the little Baby Jesus, hasn’t blasted a rail or two?

Nothing justifies what she goes through, nothing. It’s creepy enough that these people occasionally come up to her and smile unpleasantly, I mean that’s uncomfortable. But she doesn’t deserve having to be interviewed by Drew Barrymore.

No one deserves that. This bloody entity will distort everything she sees and hears and really place her in the position of looking absolutely insane to everyone around her. Worst of all, from her perspective, every word or outburst is just seen as being her diva like demands for attention or because she can’t handle her drugs (or lack thereof).

For a long while, I felt like there was maybe someone trying to mess with her, as in, an actual human antagonist who wished her ill and was drugging her water supply. That might seem like an odd thing to say, and it seems especially odd to me now that I’ve written it out, but the sheer quantity of times she is shown drinking from a Voss water bottle because she’s so parched, so thirsty is what made me think so. Turns out, I’m a fool who has forgotten about product placement in movies.

I could be, perhaps, forgiven for being naïve enough to think that if they show someone drinking from a Voss water bottle and going increasingly insane that it would seem like negative publicity for your product that you have placed in the movie, but if these days have proved nothing beyond “there is no such thing as bad publicity”, then I haven’t learned my lesson yet. So much unnecessarily bottled water, yet she never has to go to the loo – again I wondered if the
Smile entity was trying to kill her by exploding her bladder.

You may wonder why it’s doing all this elaborate stuff to her, why make her hallucinate so many terrible things before getting her to pop her clogs, but you’re asking the wrong question, because the Smile entity, the supernatural being, is the director and the producers of the movie. What that means is that Skye is being tortured in order to keep us entertained.

I don’t like watching anyone being tortured, or given false hope only to have it cruelly snatched away at the last second, but I can appreciate watching a story about a person seemingly trapped in a merciless nightmare from which there is no escape, because, hell, who hasn’t been? The difference is that for most of us the nightmares I’m talking about are in our dreams. Okay, and occasionally in life, but I’m not comparing what Skye goes through as a character in a horror film with the daily existence of the Palestinians being tormented by the IDF, or the Ukrainians trying to survive against the boorish onslaught of the depraved Russian forces, or the Congolese trying to survive against the Rwandan forces. I need movies like Smile 2 in order to briefly forget about all the actual, abject misery being experienced by countless millions in the world presently. Let me forget for two hours, then sleep, then have my own nightmares, then wake up, and for a few more seconds, not remember all that is going on.

Far more entertaining to see a pop starlet lose her mind and be attacked by her rictus smiling back up dancers. The movie does really well with incorporating the world of a pop starlet into her living nightmare, using its elements to the flick’s advantage, far more so than the first flick that just had a mousy psychologist repeating the equivalent of “this can’t be happening it makes no sense” until it’s way too late for all concerned.

Part of dragging out the experience is making it seem like Skye maybe has a chance. If you don’t believe that the protagonist of a horror flick is going to survive, then there’s little incentive to keep watching, I would argue. You want them to struggle and fight, and not go gently into that good night, and maybe save some other people along the way.

Someone with background and exposition aplenty (the only other thing I’ve ever seen him in was House where he played a jerk doctor called Dr Taub, who obviously wasn’t as much of a jerk as House himself) appears out of nowhere promising Skye a potential way out, a way to beat the curse…

Depending on how naïve you are, maybe you’ll think that’s the way to go, maybe that could work, just maybe, Skye will make it out alive. I certainly bought it, but I’m nowhere near the sharpest knife in the underwear drawer.

The real draw here is “what if the Smile curse happened to a massive celebrity?” Well, if they ever make a sequel, and I dread that they will, because sequels spread like STDs, we’re going to see the implications of what happens when a curse like this goes global – it’ll make what happened in 28 Years Later look like a sunny walk in the park.

This was solid, because it was nasty, and it didn’t chicken out. They imagined a stack of horrific images, a lot of horrible ways for Skye and the people around her to be spindled and mutilated, and they did it. Good on them, I guess.

7 times streaming this movie will kill countless musicians and their fans out of 10

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“I can't believe I might die in the freezer of a fucking Pizza Hut.” – and yet here we are - Smile 2