Smile 2 picks up right where Smile left off. Well, "six days later," as onscreen text tells us.
It's a bold move from writer/director Parker Finn that combines with a bravura long-take opening sequence to announce that Smile 2 is going to be a lot. The movie pulls from a variety of sources, from the gaudy pop pageantry of Vox Lux to the sometimes shocking gore of Hollywood's flirtation with extremity in the 2000s, to deliver an often effective horror film that bites off more than it can chew. Or perhaps it just chews too long?
The narrative moves smoothly enough from the first movie to the second, as we follow the trail of the communicable entity at the center of the Smile universe in a way that offers continuity and sets up the sequel as a standalone story. That balance holds for the exposition drops which are doled out methodically, acknowledging viewers who know the first film well enough to remember the rules and welcoming those who have never seen the first.
After the truly remarkable, if showy, opening that lays out the demon's travel path, Smile 2 introduces its protagonist, pop princess Skye Riley as she returns to public life after an accident. A year earlier, Skye and her boyfriend were in a car crash that claimed his life and served as her rock bottom, pushing her to get sober. Now, she's back on the talk show circuit promoting the new tour she's set to launch in a week's time.
The production of the tour allows Finn to create some eye-popping sequences, with strobing brightly colored lights, bedazzled costumes, and energetic choreography. But it's Skye's addiction that kicks the story proper into gear and lays out the metaphor that the film will beat to death over the next two hours.
While Skye promises that she hasn't touched booze or coke over the last year, she has developed a reliance on prescription painkillers because of her severe injuries from the crash. Painkillers that no doctor will prescribe given her history of addiction. That's led her to seek the pills in other ways, like her old high school drug dealer who just so happens to have been infected by the demon in the opening and promptly passes it along to her.
The addiction as demon metaphor is nothing new, just as the first film's overly pat tying of the entity to hereditary mental illness is nothing new, and can be interestingly explored. But Smile 2's over two hour runtime and increasingly obvious writing -- repeated affirmations of being in control are very hand-holdy -- run any of its power into the ground.
The scares start to feel repetitive as well, which is a shame, as many of them are expertly crafted. Finn uses various obstructions as characters move through spaces to build tension, and the aforementioned gore is, forgive the cliche, gnarly. It's a nice surprise when a movie full of jumpscares actually manages to make you jump a few times, but eventually these scares feel played out no matter how well they're developed.
Similarly, Finn's big directorial choices run the gamut from the thrilling (the opening long take) to the somewhat silly (at least three shots of inverted skylines). Cristobal Tapia de Veer's score, on the other hand, shifts smoothly between various registers from classic horror sounds of plinky piano and strings to glitched-out atmospherics and what sounds almost like a cleaner version of Neil Young's Dead Man score. It's a unique blend that fits well within the movie's musical world, and the only complaint one can levy is that there isn't enough experimentation with those different sounds during the scares.
Those scares take a huge leap over a shark in the finale -- just as the first did, and this kind of abrupt shift is not a bad thing in horror -- to offer up a truly astounding body horror sequence. What's disappointing, though, is that the elaborate mangling of the body is digitally realized. It doesn't look bad exactly, but it's hard not to compare it to the practical effects horror fans have been treated to this year in The Substance, In A Violent Nature, and Terrifier 3.
Perhaps Smile 3, which is well set up by that over the top finale, will incorporate more practical effects into its scenes of absurd bodily harm. But more than that, hopefully by then Finn, or whoever writes the movie, is able to use the entity to explore a new topic with some subtlety.
The films opens nationwide October 18, only in movie theaters, via Paramount Pictures. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.