Flasz On Film

When Smile, Parker Finn’s feature directorial debut based on his previous short film Laura Hasn’t Slept, opened theatrically after premiering at Fantastic Fest in 2022, it became an overnight success. On a budget of just about seventeen million dollars it grossed in excess of two hundred big ones.  

I’m not necessarily going to debate why that was, although I might brush against it in a second, but it was certain enough that this seemingly innocuous shit-your-pants scare-a-minute concoction of inspirations taken from the recent wave of elevated horror as well as the now two decades old era of J-horror visiting upon Tinseltown would immediately conceive a sequel. Which it did.  

Quite often, the notion of a genre movie enjoying such an overwhelming success invites all sorts of problems because a lot of the times the filmmakers don’t necessarily know whether the movie they made would ever carry a sequel, let alone a franchise. And what I imagine happens in many such scenarios is the cavalry arrives in the meeting room with the brazen hutzpah of the FBI taking over an investigation in an episode of your favourite 90s cop show, thank all the gathered artists for everything they’ve done so far and assume creative control over the project.  

Look, I get it. This happens in many walks of life and it is often the case that it takes a different mindset to build a company than it does to run it. However, you don’t have to look very far to find examples of how this logic may not translate very well into franchise building based on a unicorn success of a movie nobody ever expected would connect as well as it did. Often you would find the filmmakers attempt to expand on whatever lore they may or may not have accidentally baked into the narrative of their original movie. Think Blair Witch 2 as a sequel to the mind-bogglingly successful and era-defining The Blair Witch Project. Think Halloween II, and you don’t have to limit yourself to the original continuity because the same is true for the Rob Zombie-helmed revival. In fact, you might also have a look at how David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends tries to look for new avenues to explore. You may want to think of all the sequels to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist too, none of which anyone ever asked for.  

The point I’m making is that filmmakers often find it difficult to keep it in their pants and instead of locking onto what made their movie great and capitalizing on their strengths, they see the idea of being given the money and space to make a sequel to their successful feature as an invitation to let their creative hogs loose. Thus, a lot of the time, sequels to massively successful genre ventures fail to connect with their target audiences or show in no uncertain terms that either the filmmakers didn’t care about what made their original movie work or that they didn’t have a scooby about it. 

Meanwhile, sometimes it might just be OK for a sequel to present itself as more of the same. Not twice as much of the same. Not double-or-nothing. Just simply the same thing once more, with feeling. And the trick is to figure out which movies are best served by such a treatment, because sometimes you want to lean into something a bit more. Maybe go a bit harder on the gore. Maybe play with the narrative structure. Maybe add a villain. I don’t know. But sometimes it’s just fine to slap a number two on the title and concoct a movie that executes exactly what the original did, once more. Without pretentions, misguided ambitions or without aspiring to open up some kind of a mythology or a narrative continuity.  

Which is what Smile 2 is in relation to its predecessor, just more of the same. In fact, the movie picks up where the original left off and continues on from there. Not that it matters anyway because the entire concept of a malevolent entity jumping from person to person by virtue of having a new victim witness the previous host’s traumatizing and violent suicide is almost completely decoupled from whatever lore you might think this movie carries over from the original. It’s wholly inconsequential. All that matters is that we know—and those who don’t know will get their opportunity to learn it anyway—that we will be shadowing a character as they slowly detach from reality, figure out what’s happening to them and then attempt to shake off whatever this curse is. And as they are on this journey, we will get to witness some good old-fashioned scares, creepy moments and brief flashes of intense violence.  

Thus, Smile 2, having opened with a brief hook connecting the movie to its predecessor and also having given us an opportunity to look at some blood and guts for good measure, transports us into the headspace of a young pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott in a legitimately great performance) who intends to stage a comeback tour after a period of recovery from drug addiction and a traumatic accident which had claimed the life of her boyfriend. One night she goes to her drug dealer to get some painkillers (because whatever her doctor prescribes isn’t doing the trick or something) and it just so happens that her drug dealer (Lucas Gage) carries the curse we all remember from the first film. He mortifies Skye by bludgeoning himself to death and from there Skye begins to see smiling people everywhere, her dreams become traumatizing nightmares replete with—you guessed it—non-diegetic scares that will test the integrity of your sphincter function, and as a result she becomes progressively detached from reality.  

That’s all you need to know about the movie because—I’m being completely serious here—it is literally more of what Smile had on offer. It doesn’t lean into any of its aspects more. It’s not scarier or gorier. The characters are new. Naomi Scott gives a pleasant performance. The twists are recognizable. And it all. Just. Works.  

It just goes to show that Parker Finn, who came back to write and direct it, and his merry bunch of co-conspirators understood not only what made their movie cook but what kind of an audience it was speaking to. And this is key here because even though the movie is scary and violent, it’s tame enough to be accessible to wide audiences. It’s not Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead or one of the Terrifier movies which speak to gorehounds more than anybody else. Sure, it’s rated 18 in the UK, but it operates within parameters suitable for a general adult audience. You can take a bunch of friends to see Smile 2 and nobody will exit in disgust. It will get intense for some, but I can guarantee that most people who end up walking into this movie will emerge somewhat entertained and with their adrenaline levels raised appropriately, just as though they’d emerge from a rollercoaster ride at a good quality theme park.  

Finn’s sequel to Smile strikes a great balance between intensity of the experience and respect for the audience they are playing to because what you see still offers a bunch of brown-pants moments and occasionally takes you on a creepy-yet-comfortingly-brief expedition into Skye’s degrading mental state—it’s always upsetting to see a grinning naked man who’s clearly out of shape launch into a sprint towards the camera—but it seems to know when to pull back and keep the viewer from actually relieving themselves right there and then or exiting the cinema in visceral disgust at the gore they’ve just witnessed. It’s fun arm’s-length entertainment that is as scary as it could be without being opressively upsetting and as violent as it can be without crossing the line and entering the territory of indulgent body horror a viewer needs to be a bit more prepared for.  

In fact, Smile 2 is a perfectly predictable rollercoaster ride that capitalizes somewhat (just like its predecessor, by the way) on some traits of the elevated horror while functioning within the J-horror space of movies like The Ring and The Grudge (the latter of which similarly thrived on a handful of out-of-nowhere sphincter exercises built into the experience). It’s not smart or revolutionary; instead it’s conveniently predictable and functionally competent. So, if you’re looking for a horror movie that will get your juices flowing or tickle your intellect, do yourself a favour and take an Ari Aster movie or a Jordan Peele joint off the shelf and watch one of those instead. And if you’re looking for something truly violent and gross, this doesn’t top what Evil Dead Rise did, so you might as well hop on to see Terrifier 3, which is a safer bet in this regard.  

Smile 2 is a rollercoaster experience. No. Scratch that. It’s a cinematic deconstipator. An experience where you will be scared out of your shoes and often in ways that are not truly original. But you will jump out of your seat. And then you will be bolted back to it as the movie will take you through creepy sequences (one involving smiley dancers in Skye’s house is a standout). And then you shall wince, but not enough to look away or fight to keep your food down. It’s all curated for maximum rush within a controlled setting of a well-engineered theme park ride. A ride designed to test your capability to keep your pants from browning unintentionally.  

Which is exactly what I think mainstream audiences want and demand during the Halloween season. Smile 2 is in many ways a perfect horror movie for the season as it will entertain most people. It won’t make anyone feel stupid for not getting what’s happening. In fact, it will make less intellectually-inclined viewers feel smart for understanding the shallowly-embedded thematic layer discussing trauma and PTSD using nothing but accessible metaphorical tools.  

It’s a people-pleasing genre movie that rides as close to the line of good taste as possible without ever running a risk of alienating everyone. It’s a horror movie you can show to your wimpy partner and they might just emerge happy to be alive because it might be the most intense thing they will have seen all year. And they will not need to wear a nappy to watch it… even though it might come close.