About to embark on a new world tour, global pop sensation Skye Riley begins to experience increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events. Overwhelmed by the escalating horrors and pressures of fame, she must face her dark past to regain control of her life before it spirals out of control.
Director: Parker Finn
Cast: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Peter Jacobson, Raúl Castillo, Dylan Gelula, Ray Nicholson, Kyle Gallner
Release Date: October 18, 2024
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Rated R for strong bloody violent content, grisly images, language throughout and drug use.
Runtime: 2h 12m
Review:
Parker Finn's Smile 2 is gorier and devilishly funnier than its predecessor as focus shifts to a damaged pop star played by a stellar Naomi Scott. Finn's second turn, immediately feels more confident and elegantly eerie as we follow Skye Riley's decent into madness. He still relies on jump scares a tad too much for my taste but its hard to hate it too much when he sets up those moments up so effectively. A handful of sequences are anxiety inducing and set up with impressive visual panache such as a gloriously nightmarish where Skye's smiling back up dancers chasing her around her apartment. There are a handful of moments like that which leaves a noticeable impact with each leaving you wonder what's real and what's not as things get increasingly out of control. This all doesn't work nearly as well as it does if not for a instantly engaging turn from Naomi Scott. Scott is fully committed from the start by bringing a believable sense of mental fraying from the onset. Her Skye is damaged and isolated before the madness begins due to a horrific event that's left her traumatized beforehand. Scott conveys that sense of isolation and self hate with a natural ease that's incredibly impressive. As things get more dire and her character starts to fall apart at the seams there's an exasperated terror to her as she starts to lose her grip on reality and she becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator. Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Miles Gutierrez-Riley and Dylan Gelula are solid in supporting roles but this is Scott's showcase and she is the most fascinating performer onscreen throughout the entire film. Given the amount of celebrities we've seen go off the rails there's something that feels slightly more realistic about this setup than the original which makes it one of the few horror films to earn its two hour runtime. Smile 2 proves to be one of the rare horror sequels that improves on the original by taking in a slightly different sphere to deliver a mash up of The Ring and Nightmare on Elm Street which leaves me eager to see where the series goes next.
A-
