{Movie Review} No Medicine to Change Me: Smile 2 (2024)

“It’s supposed to be some form of acknowledgement for what I can and can’t control.”

I’m one of the few people I know who really liked Parker Finn’s 2022 feature debut Smile – it was one of my favorite movies of that year – but obviously I’m not alone. Originally fated for an ignominious streaming bow, Smile enjoys an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and became a sleeper hit upon its unexpected theatrical release, raking in more than $200 million against a budget of less than a tenth of that, thereby guaranteeing that a sequel was inevitable.

Under such circumstances, Smile 2 could – and sometimes does – feel like simply cashing in. But part of what made me enjoy the first one so much also guarantees that even a sequel that is frequently spinning its wheels is equally compelling, and Finn takes advantage of Smile 2’s expanded budget, which is nearly double that of its predecessor, to craft a visually bolder film crammed with more ambitious set pieces, even while the story itself stays intimate and laser-focused on the smile demon’s latest victim, pop star Skye Riley, played by singer and actress Naomi Scott.

At the same time, Smile 2 isn’t just a retread of the first movie, even while many of its beats are going to feel very familiar. Where that film spent most of its narrative energy on the victim’s quest to understand what was happening to her, Skye gets no such arc. For most of Smile 2, she has no idea what is happening to her or why, and the explanations she finally does get come near the film’s final act, from an exposition dump provided by “that guy” regular Peter Jacobson.

This lack of agency on Skye’s part could easily be frustrating, and I certainly don’t blame anyone who reacts to it with frustration, but I think it is an intentional choice, reflecting other differences in the film’s focus which come with its change of protagonist. Naomi Scott is about the same age that Sosie Bacon was in the first movie, but she feels younger, and the makeup and staging decisions make her feel younger still.

More importantly, though, Skye is a pop star, already a massive sensation, although not one so well-established that one more wrong move couldn’t potentially scuttle everything she has built. Before she becomes caught up in the viral curse at the heart of the movie, her life is already not hers.

Her every move is observed, her every hour dictated and programmed, as carefully and painstakingly choreographed as the dance moves she spends hours rehearsing. So much so that, later in the film, when she falls and has a concussion after already showing considerable signs of mental decline, her mother says – as though it is the height of beneficence – that one whole day has been cleared for her to recover.

Obviously, the Smile films are concerned with issues of mental illness, and masking (there’s a reason why the demon always wears a smile, after all), and similar themes – whether you think they do a good job of addressing them or not. And those are emphatically still present here. But where they were the main focus of the first movie, where the protagonist was a therapist, they are joined in this one by differences created by Skye’s alternative career.

Rather than simply an opportunity for bigger set pieces or songs that act as, if not exactly a Greek chorus, then at least an underlining of some of the movie’s subjects, the decision to make Skye a pop star also brings to the fore questions about the pressures of fame, about lack of agency, about exploitation, and about how the demands of capitalism get in the way of taking care of our mental health.

Most of us may not be able to relate to being a massive pop star, after all, but we can all relate to financial pressures preventing us from taking the time and space that we need to care for our own mental wellbeing.

There’s another way in which Skye being a pop star offers an interesting lens through which to view the film, as well. I mentioned earlier that a lot of people I know don’t care for the Smile movies, and I’m not going to put words in their mouths to say why that is. But I think that viewing Smile and Smile 2 as similar to pop songs is an instructive way to think about these films and their place in the cinematic landscape.

Though R-rated and gory – the higher budget also means that considerably more grue is on display in Smile 2 – these films are designed and calibrated as popular entertainments. They’re meant to go mainstream. They occupy a niche (the viral curse) that has, since the success of the American remake of The Ring in 2002, largely become the provenance of “teenybopper horror” like Truth of Dare, Wish Upon, or this year’s Tarot, to name just a few.

Parker Finn brings an impressive bag of visual tricks to both movies, but they are also polished in a way that reflects the highly-produced pop song, rather than the faux-grindhouse or -arthouse aesthetic that is more popular in “serious” horror these days. They rely heavily on jump scares, and some of the set pieces (especially in this sequel) are clearly designed with the intention of making them easy to pull out of context and drop into a TikTok down the road.

Like pop songs, these kinds of films have broad mainstream appeal, but they are particularly popular among teenagers. And like anything that is popular among teenagers – especially teenage girls – they are widely disrespected and dismissed by those who see themselves as above such “vapid” entertainments.

Are the Smile films vapid? I don’t think so. Their messaging may sometimes be muddled, but they are tackling ideas every bit as big as any given “elevated horror” film, even if they’re doing so through a more approachable pop lens. And even if they were vapid, there’s room out there for vapid movies that deploy their shocks and jolts this well.

And if nothing else, the Smile franchise is proof positive that you can buy a lot of goodwill from me simply by including a huge, gnarly Trevor Henderson-esque monster in your movie when you could easily have gotten away with not doing so.