#80: Smile 2
Release Date: October 18th, 2024
Format: Theater (Cinemark in Downey, CA)
Written by: Parker Finn
Directed by: Parker Finn
3.5 Stars
I could imagine a scenario wherafter his debut feature film, Smile, made over $217 million on a $17 million budget, writer/director Parker Finn was approached by producers with an option: a larger budget to make a Smile sequel, or a much, much smaller budget to make something else.
Finn chose the former, but now that he’s made two really solid horror flicks, I’m hoping the next time the producers come to him with an offer for Smile 3, he has the confidence to choose the latter.
And it’s not because I don’t like these Smile movies. Like I said, they are solid horror movies, and scary. But more than the scares, he has a knack for character development and dialogue, a secondary thought for many of his horror writing contemporaries.
I feel like the conceit of the Smile movies, that there is a demon that tries to drive a person to suicide by possessing the people around them (and giving them a sinister smile), is effective (and scary), but is a bit of a missed opportunity.
In the case of the first Smile, I wrote in my review that I thought it would have been more interesting to present this smile-inducing demon conceit to the audience, but in a twist, reveal in the end that the movie is actually about paranoid schizophrenia. Wouldn’t it be intriguing to have a movie where the protagonist and the audience are certain there is a demon afoot, but there actually isn’t?
In the case of Smile 2, Finn could have approached the story in a similar way, but with the mental health focus now on the punishing effects of celebrity and drug addiction. Again, our protagonist could be adamant that certain things exist, and we the audience agree, but we’re wrong. The demon is drugs and stress-induced paranoia, not a possessive entity.
But enough complaining (which I did a lot of in my first Smile review, too).
I really liked this movie, about a Grammy-winning global pop star named Skye Riley, a recovering drug addict, who tweaks her back during dance rehearsals for her upcoming tour and seeks out her old drug dealer to score Vicodin to deal with the pain. Unbeknownst to Skye, her dealer is the target of the Smile entity and he finally succumbs to its mind games, brutally killing himself with a weightlifting plate in front of her, effectively passing the possession on to her.
Will Skye be able to survive her demonic possession? You’ll have to wait until the final shot of the movie to find out.
But again, Finn’s writing and directing are almost too elevated for this conceit. There were long stretches of this movie where I was more invested in the Skye Riley character and her relationship with her childhood best friend and mother, and the trauma of witnessing the death of her boyfriend in a car accident years earlier, than I was with the horror aspect of the film. I’m not disappointed when the movie transitions from the dramatical scenes back to the scares, but it’s obvious that Finn doesn’t use horror as a crutch. He has a natural ability with pacing his dramatic dialogue and he works well with his actors.
And speaking of the acting, Skye Riley is played by Naomi Scott, an incredible actress I had never seen or even heard of.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that her performance is as good as any performance I can think of in a horror film. She is absolutely incredible. Mind you, that in this month alone, I’ve seen Marilyn Burns’s performance in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jamie Lee Curtis’ performance in Halloween, and Kathy Bates’ performance in Misery. I’m confident in saying that her performance belongs in that esteemed company.
My wish? Parker Finn has found his muse in Naomi Scott and goes on to write an original suspense drama in which she can star.
More likely? Smile 2 makes a ton of money, and Paramount backs the Brinks truck up to Finn and tempts him to unleash that smiling demon one more time.
