[31 Days of Horror] Day 17

Director: Parker Finn
Cast: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kyle Gallner, Lukas Gage, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Peter Jacobson, Raul Castillo, Dylan Gelula, Ray Nicholson
Screenplay: Parker Finn
127 mins. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, grisly images, language throughout and drug use.

The original Smile succeeded at creating a compellingly original horror tale based around ideas that I didn’t think would work, notably featuring an entity that would manifest as people smiling all around you. I thought the trailers looked dull, but I was surprised at director Parker Finn’s ability to uplift strange ideas using interesting and compelling characters, and I very much enjoyed his final product (specifically that creature reveal at the end). Combine that with some terrific marketing on the part of Paramount, and you have a hit. Now, just a few years later, Finn returns to with a sequel, this time bigger and bolder and also…pretty much more of the same, though still entertainingly macabre.

Picking up just days after the events of the first time, we follow Skye Riley (Naomi Scott, The Martian), a pop superstar who stepped away from the limelight after a drug-fueled car wreck changed her life forever. Clean now but struggling, the curse is transferred to her from her dealer, and now she cannot discover if the smiling people around her are fans…or something worse.

The biggest strength of Smile 2 is its central performance from Naomi Scott. This is an actress that I’ve been consistently impressed with, and she gets the spotlight, literally, in this sequel. The core strength of the previous film was also the lead actress, played by Sosie Bacon, and it would appear that writer/director Finn not only is capable of writing intelligent and interesting protagonists, but working with his lead actresses to get the most from that performance. Finn made a smart decision this time around to find a new focal connection for the Smile curse, involving a completely different kind of character with a different type of trauma. While the first film dealt with unchecked grief over the death of a loved one, Smile 2 is very much that through the lens of drug addiction. Much in the way that Fede Alvarez tackled the difficult process of getting clean in his Evil Dead film, Finn and Scott have crafted an interesting bit of character drama that ties her struggle to stay sober with her ongoing mental crisis caused by the curse.

Unfortunately, Finn’s sequel does struggle with maintaining its overstretched time with some poor pacing and a problem with repetitious scare sequences that often don’t provide enough uniqueness to the film to justify its length. There are some solid jumper moments, but I never felt the sustained tension or dread of the first time. Smile 2 is entertaining, enough to satisfy fans of the first, but it clings a bit too closely to familiar territory. It seems, at one point, to be elaborating on the mythology in an interesting way, including a potential solve to the curse, but it didn’t commit to those ideas, leaving me a little frustrated at its lack of forward momentum. That being said, the film makes good on its finale, providing a head-scratchingly wild way to live a film that definitely excited me for a likely Smile 3 in the near future.

Parker Finn has crafted a nice little horror franchise for himself, and even though I don’t think Smile 2 has as much bite as its predecessor, you can see his passion for the world onscreen, and he’s telling his story with some pretty fantastic flourishes (that opening one-shot sequences is a banger). I’d love to see what he has in store for Smile 3, but I’m hoping he takes a step away for his next project in order to flex his talents elsewhere first and then come back for a solid trilogy capper, and I’d like to see him add something new to the story to help justify its need. Smile 2 left me wanting more even if its occasionally lost in the shadow of the original, but the theatrical experience of this one really worked for me.

3/5
-Kyle A. Goethe