Content Warning/Editors Note: this review will feature spoilers for “Smile 2.” It also discusses themes and elements that may be distressing for some readers, including mental health issues and trauma.
“Smile 2” was recently released in theaters, expanding on the movie released in 2022, “Smile.” This movie follows fictional pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) who is planning a comeback tour after having been through a drug and alcohol addiction, self-harm and a car crash that ended her boyfriend’s, actor Paul Hudson’s (Ray Nicholson) life.
The movie begins by showing Joel (Kyle Gallner) killing two men and transferring the curse to Lewis (Lucas Gage), a man who is later shown to be selling drugs to Skye Riley. In that scene, Lewis took his own life in front of her, passing on the curse.
The movie was similar to the first, maintaining the psychological horror theme, but instead of focusing more on the curse, “Smile 2” also focuses on the effects the curse had on Skye Riley. The curse damages her mental being and she slowly starts reconsidering her tour. Regardless, she is forced to follow through despite her paranoid behavior causing conflicts to blossom between her coworkers, fans and mother.
The movie included a creative use of choreography, music and dancing that added on to the popstar theme of the film. All of the scenes that included the curse were portrayed with hair-raising visuals, making me want to close my eyes out of fear, but also looked so intriguing that I couldn’t help but to watch.
Throughout the movie, Skye Riley is exposed to many fans and situations that result in the curse commonly appearing. She seems to hallucinate people breaking into her house and even sees the actor she killed at a public speech while she’s on stage. There wasn’t a second wasted in the film, each moment was suspenseful and had shocking plot twists.
After receiving texts from an unknown number throughout the movie, she finally agrees to meet the person who offers a solution to the curse she was enduring. The man explained that his own brother had gone through the same situation and he had done research to figure out how to stop the virus from spreading to anyone else. He decides that if he can kill and resuscitate Skye Riley before the entity found a new host, then they could successfully stop the curse from taking the lives of others.
During this process, Skye Riley hallucinated herself trapped in a room with herself from the night of the fatal car crash. She is closed in a room that opens on a stage, where she is supposed to be performing a song on her tour. There, she sees the monster of the curse, and finally takes her own life in front of the entire crowd of fans.
The ending implies that almost everything Riley was seeing was a figment of her imagination because of the manipulation of the entity that was consuming her. This leaves the viewer questioning what did and did not truly happen throughout the movie. I enjoyed this ending, I thought that it was very smart to leave viewers guessing what would happen next because the curse had potentially spread to everyone in the crowd.
Overall, “Smile 2” was a outstanding movie that uses frightening visuals and says a lot about the price of superstardom. I believe Naomi Scott’s performance portrays her mental state exeptionally and unlike other movie sequels, “Smile 2” was in no way disappointing.
