Smile 2 Is a Tacky Pop Thriller About a Diva and Her Demons With a Certain Sinister Allure
It's like that creepy Aphex Twin album cover, but in horror sequel form!
In Smile 2, Naomi Scott plays Skye Riley, a Lady Gaga-level superstar still in the process of healing after just barely surviving a fiery car wreck that took the life of her boyfriend.
The movie needs us to believe that Scott could be the kind of world-famous performer tens of thousands of people happily pay hundreds of dollars to see perform. She’s not just a successful musician: she is a goddamn superstar. She sells out stadiums. She’s world-famous. Everyone knows her, her music, and, unfortunately for her, her very public battle with alcoholism and drug abuse.
Scott has achieved considerable success in the world of entertainment. Her ascent to stardom started when she was a teenager who scored a hit album with the soundtrack to the Disney television movie Lemonade Mouth, which she also starred in.
Since then, she has been one of the newfangled “Woke” Charlie’s Angels and a gritty, revisionist Power Ranger, as well as Jasmine in the billion-dollar Alladin live-action remake.
Scott is a real-life star of pop music and hit movies, so it shouldn’t be difficult to accept her as a fabulously successful pop star with a troubled past and a REALLY fucked-up present.
Scott is a lovely woman, but in her garish, unflattering stage outfits, she looks like she’s been gift-wrapped in tacky paper.
My brain never quite bought Sky as a superstar, perhaps because the film’s depiction of pop stardom is so lonely and stripped down. That’s partially by design. Sky’s life and career were a flaming trainwreck even before an accident nearly killed her.
She’s self-conscious about needing Vicodin for her injured back because she has been very public about her addiction and her recovery. There are dozens of people whose lives and livelihoods depend on a deeply troubled human being able to perform an emotionally and physically exhausting performance in front of tens of thousands of people in a different city every night.
That’s asking an awful lot of anyone, but particularly someone still recovering from the kind of trauma that leaves you with PTSD and all manner of trauma.
It’s the kind of impossible pressure that is first aided by the use of stimulants, painkillers, and other drugs and then irrevocably harmed by those same substances.
We’re introduced to Scott’s abrasive anti-hero in the most terrifying possible setting: the set of Drew Barrymore’s eponymous daytime scab fest, I mean talk show. The way that monster undervalues her employees is nothing short of chilling.
In need of Vicodan and understandably reluctant to go through official channels out of fear of being exposed as less than completely sober, she resorts to relying on seedy underworld connections. Unfortunately, her desperate visit to a drug dealer she went to high school with goes awry when he begins behaving bizarrely and violently before smiling in a manner more or less exactly like the cover of the 1996 Aphex Twins album Richard D. James.
I will be the first to concede that that is a VERY creepy smile. It’s unnerving. It’s weird. It’s quietly horrifying. But is it enough to build a movie on, let alone an entire franchise?
Smile 2 has one trick, but it’s a pretty good, pretty creepy trick.
Sky is further traumatized when the drug-dealing weirdo who is freaking her out smashes his face with a heavyweight. I had to look away during this scene. It’s weird; I love horror. It’s one of my favorite things in the world. I recently wrote a horror novel. I love horror as a genre, yet I’m extremely squeamish when it comes to explicit gore. The fucked up thing is that I think gore is art, but I also can’t really look at it for too long.
Smile 2 has a LOT of lovingly realized gore that I could appreciate on a creative level, but I looked away from the screen for a lot of the gnarly stuff, of which there is a lot.
The image of a ghoulishly grinning man smashing his face until it’s a queasy, oozing pulp of blood and bone and muscle is horrifying, but the film’s central image of someone with an Aphex Twin spooky smile leering at our heroine grows less scary with repetition.
The exception is a striking sequence in which Sky’s backup dancers, who we earlier saw performing with Sky in choreography that calls to mind the way that Paula Abdul’s video for “Cold Hearted Snake” pays reverent homage to Bob Fosse's icy sensuality, approach our heroine en masse, all sharing the same sinister smile. These grinning ghouls are most viscerally unnerving when they don’t move like human beings but rather arachnid monsters that are all arms and legs and unnerving intensity.
Everywhere Sky goes, she is tormented by strangers, friends, and family members, all sporting Aphex Twin grins. But are these horrifying visions real or figments of the tormented singer’s vivid imagination?
Sky begins cracking under the combined forces of superstardom and mysterious evil. As the film progresses, she becomes increasingly unhinged. It becomes difficult, and then impossible, to hide her psychological descent from a public that, depending on the scene, adores and reveres her, pities her, or finds her very existence unsettling.
Fame and wealth alienated Sky from the world. She’s prickly and aloof and alone in a way that seems both poignant and off. Superstars on that level are surrounded by flunkies and hangers-on and various opportunists, but Sky is alone in the world except for her internal demons and the actual demons pursuing her.
While Smile 2 did not engage me emotionally, I was impressed by elements of it. I found its body horror both inspired and stomach-churning.
At its best, Smile 2 resurrects the puke-inducing nasty inventiveness of The Substance. The big difference is that The Substance is an art film of the vomit-provokingly gross variety, while Smile 2 is commerce.
I was a little surprised to discover that this is getting mostly positive reviews. I assume that everyone has the same opinions as me, a bipolar autistic man with ADHD who has devoted his nearly three-decade career to watching and writing about weird movies. But apparently, that’s not the case, and there are people who actually have lives and experiences markedly different than mine.
The director has a real eye for disturbing imagery. The movie ends much stronger than it begins. That’s better for a film than to begin strongly and then peter out because you leave audiences on a high rather than limping to a finish.
With a better script, a more original premise, and a better plot, this could really have been something.
Sadly, Smile 2 did not make me smile, but I don’t think that’s what they were necessarily going for. Still, like the recent and thematically similar Trap, this has a vulgar rock and roll energy that sets it apart from other genre movies that don’t work but don’t have the peculiar stickiness of this and M. Night Shyamalan instant camp classic.
Two and a half stars out of Five
I think I voted for the option in your poll. Obviously there’s no right or wrong in an opinion survey, but I’m almost always on the losing side, and also constantly delighted by the resulting reviews.
I loved the opening sequence and the ending. A lot. So much so it took me a few hours after the whole thing ended to remember how repetitive and tedious I found much of the rest of this movie.