Long Beach, CA – “Smile 2” is a new horror movie that continues the story from the first film released in 2022. In this sequel, a creepy entity moves from one person to another when they witness someone commit suicide. This time, the main character is Skye Riley, a very popular singer. She becomes the next target for the Smile creature, and its control over her mind makes her deal with her own past traumas. The film has some cool moments, but it also has some issues.
In “Smile 2”, we follow Skye on her journey to heal and make a big return to music as she gets ready for her upcoming world tour. While getting everything ready, she runs into an old friend who has been taken over by the Smile entity, becoming its new host. The story starts to look a lot like the first movie, with Skye trying to figure out what’s going on and how to escape the scary mind games of the entity. The real suspense comes from Skye’s struggle to keep her sanity while trying to break free from the curse.
Skye, portrayed by Naomi Scott, delivers an impressive performance as an actor, singer, and dancer. She captures the struggle of someone facing her own inner battles along with a supernatural threat, making her character both relatable and intriguing.
Writer and director Parker Finn has really turned up the creepiness of the Smile creature, almost to the point of overdoing it, but he still manages to make it one of the coolest new horror monsters in films. One of the standout moments in the movie is when the entity takes on the faces of Skye’s backup dancers, who move around her with these spooky and mesmerizing smiles. It perfectly mixes horror with performance art, creating a scene that’s both unsettling and visually amazing because you can see the dancers are having a good time.
“Smile 2” tackled issues with the first movie. In the first film, it was obvious that the entity could be beaten by dying in a way that stopped the curse from passing on, but the characters didn’t look into that. In the sequel, Skye thinks about this possibility, showing how filmmakers can build on a story’s background to outsmart the entity. They also add more interesting details to the lore without going overboard by showing different host transfers and some new research that fits well with the original film.
Even though the movie has great visuals and a solid story, it does have some problems. For one, “Smile 2” is over two hours long, which is way too much. Hollywood really needs to work on making their movies shorter. Some scenes felt like they were just there to add more tension, and if they had cut some of those, the story would have been tighter. For example, I enjoyed the first 15 minutes that connected the original movie to the sequel, but that part could have been removed to make the film shorter. There are also several scenes that show Skye’s life as a celebrity. While they look cool, they could have been trimmed down or even taken out because they started to feel like they were repeating themselves.
The movie has a bit of a rough ending. It doesn’t give any clues about how the creature could infect a bunch of people at once, which makes it hard to believe when it tries to show that happening. The change from a close, psychological horror to something that feels like a zombie outbreak seems out of place since the film never hinted that this could happen.
He finished the movie right when Skye died, and he didn’t tell us if the infection spread widely, if it only worked a little, or if the creature could still only move to one person at a time. This is such a clever cliffhanger because it leaves us wondering about one of the coolest questions in horror movies that I’ve seen in a while.
