Smile 2 is smarter, scarier and much better than the first film

The original Smile felt like a miracle when it released in 2022: a well-made, decidedly solid horror film plucked from the obscure hell of direct-to-streaming releases and turned into a bona fide blockbuster. But despite all its commercial success, Smile could never escape the fact that life began as an excellent short film that was stretched to feature length. The feature-length film has a few good scares, but it’s more of a promise of something great than it is great in itself. For the sequel, writer-director Parker Finn delivers on this promise. Smile 2 is bigger, scarier, funnier, smarter, darker and undeniably better than its predecessor.

Smile 2 opens with a masked gunman taking a drug dealer hostage and then desperately trying to kill his prisoner as the hostage’s associate watches. It’s a clever reintroduction of the franchise’s murderous virus, which manifests as an evil ear-to-ear grin, but it’s also a huge show of confidence from Finn. The sequence – which is more action than horror – is mostly handled in just one take, with the camera movements and action carefully choreographed to capture every little detail and keep us glued to the action. By the time the title card drops, with a reminder that this will be a particularly bloody ride, it’s already clear that we’re in expert hands.

The rest of the film remains tightly focused on international pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), as she prepares for a massive comeback tour a year after a horrific car accident that marked the low point in her battle with addiction. Just days before the tour opens, she visits an old friend who is behaving erratically, then suddenly commits suicide in front of her, infecting her with the Smile Curse and causing all the horrible, unraveling hallucinations that keep this franchise going .

Using the world of a pop superstar is a perfect step forward Smile‘s creepy premise, but it also feels like a bit of metatextual playfulness from Finn. It’s an acknowledgment that his franchise has hit the big time, and that he can upgrade from the faceless protagonist of the first film to someone who sells out (fictional) arenas. And Skye is really the selling point Smile 2. Finn’s script builds a nuanced, interesting version of a pop star, one far enough removed from real meaning to feel like a fully realized character rather than a cheap shot at a certain real singer.

Finn writes Skye admirably as someone far removed from normalcy. She has concerns we can relate to, about her career and her friends, but Finn never tries to imbue her fatigue with fame with synthetic relatability. She feels like a balancing act bordering on a magic trick: we can sympathize with her because Scott gives an incredibly grounded and human performance, but Finn never asks us to relate too closely to her. We witness her story without imprinting ourselves in it.

This is partly due to the details the film weaves into Skye’s past. We learn the ways in which she has hurt those around her long before the grinning apparitions appeared. We see the ways she copes and hear what tricks her therapist has given her. A particularly effective flashback even lets us know just how dark things got for Skye before the movie even starts.

Delving into these finer points of Skye’s life also allows Finn to create a more fully realized story around her. Where the first film felt like a few good ideas for scary stories with a rickety plot and empty characters only meant to tie them together, Smile 2Skye’s focus on Skye and her story allows the horror to flow naturally from that chase. And boy, does it ever. The plot specificity keeps Finn from falling into less interesting scares; instead, it fuels his creativity, allowing him to create more elaborate and creepy set pieces than anything in the original.

Smile 2 contains some fantastic scares in crowded arenas, but Finn finds the film’s best horrors in Skye’s lavish apartment. He turns the beautiful straight lines and 90-degree angles of penthouse hallways into an endlessly shifting maze of angles with laughing visions behind them, delivering one of the most inventive and enjoyable jump scares of any film this year. In the best of these apartment scenes, Skye finds her home being invaded by smiling backup dancers who shift and morph into bizarre, contorted positions every time her back is turned. It’s the perfect embodiment of a balance between creepy and silly, a balance that Finn manages to strike again and again, to tremendous effect each time.

More importantly, apart from some silliness, Smile 2 is also genuinely funny. Humor was sorely missed in the first film, which too often bordered on dour compared to the grinning monsters. Smile 2on the other, acknowledges that a certain amount of humor is essential if we’re to delve into the bleak world of a troubled superstar. It’s another example of how Finn lets his story and protagonist determine the mood of the film, rather than the other way around.

This character-oriented storytelling approach is present throughout the film, but it is crucial to the film Smile 2‘s hallucination sequences. As with the first film, the Smile Curse causes a victim to see a distorted version of reality once infected. The original film uses that dynamic to present one version of events and then pull the rug out to shock us with another, whether it’s a character with a menacing grin that was never really there, or our hero who stabs an attacker, only to realize that they’ve accidentally attacked a friend. In the first film, this cinematic bait-and-switch made for some good jumps, but more often than not it felt cheap: We never really knew enough about protagonist Rose (Sosie Bacon) to know what it means to see things through . her eyes, or to know what specific insecurities the curse was trying to feed in these visions. That will certainly not be the case in the future.

Each of Skye’s hallucinations revolves closely around a specific person or group that she does not want to abandon. Because they all focus on different people in her life, each of these scenes has a unique structure: Finn lets the tension build organically until it devolves into a horrifying surreality, like the late-movie confrontation that feels like a perfectly normal shouting match, until it suddenly goes a step too far. This gives each vision a distinct flavor, turning each vision into a crazy guessing game for the audience as they ponder what’s real and what’s not – all leading to a reveal that feels like the perfect culmination of the series’ premise.

Besides simply creating much more effective scares and startling scenes, these hallucinations also make the thematic thrust of the film more effective. The first film is perhaps the worst example yet modern horror films that deal with overwrought trauma metaphors – in fact the original Smile even went so far as to have a character literally explain on screen that the real curse is trauma. The sequel omits that comparison, along with any explanation of the curse. In doing so, Finn creates a compelling metaphor for the way addiction distances people from their loved ones and the world around them. It’s understated (until a particularly frustrating moment near the end of the film) and therefore far more effective than anything in the original film.

Smile Dodging the streaming abyss and finding box office success felt like a miracle, but Smile 2 is something even rarer: a horror sequel that surpasses its predecessor in every way. Rather than simply repeating the original, Parker Finn pushes its clever premise to its logical extreme and builds some incredibly creepy scenes to match. Finn even ends Smile 2 in a place that feels like the perfect conclusion to the franchise – and the perfect starting point for the career of one of the most exciting horror directors of his generation.

Smile 2 debuts in theaters on October 18.