“Smile 2” is the rare sequel that is better than the original in every way

The original Smile When it hit theaters in 2022, it felt like a miracle: a well-made, extremely solid horror film plucked from the obscure hell of direct-to-streaming release and made into a bona fide box office hit. But despite its commercial success Smile could never escape the fact that it started as an excellent short film that was then expanded to feature length. The feature-length film has a few good scary moments, but it's more of a promise of something great than it is great in its own right. For the sequel, writer and director Parker Finn keeps this promise in every respect. Smile 2 is bigger, scarier, funnier, smarter, darker and undeniably better than its predecessor.

Smile 2 The film begins with a masked gunman taking a drug dealer hostage and then desperately trying to kill his prisoner as the hostage's associate looks on. It's a clever reintroduction of the franchise's murderous virus, which manifests itself in a malevolent grin from ear to ear, but it's also a huge display of confidence from Finn. The sequence – which is more action than horror – is mostly just one shot, with the camera movements and action precisely choreographed to capture every little detail and keep us on the edge of our seats. As the title card appears and reminds us that this is going to be a particularly bloody ride, it's already clear that we're in expert hands.

The rest of the film continues to focus heavily on international pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), as she prepares for a major comeback tour a year after a horrific car accident that marked the nadir in her battle with addiction. Just days before the tour begins, she visits an old friend who is behaving erratically, then suddenly kills himself in front of her, infecting her with the Smile Curse and triggering all the terrifying, dissolving hallucinations that define this franchise.

Harnessing the world of a pop superstar is a perfect step forward SmileIt's a creepy premise, but it also feels like a bit of metatextual playfulness on Finn's part. It's a confirmation that his franchise is a huge success, and he can go from the anonymous protagonist of the first film to someone who sells out (fictional) arenas. And Skye is really the selling point Smile 2. Finn's script creates a nuanced, interesting version of a pop star, someone far enough removed from real-life signifiers to feel like a fully realized character rather than a cheap version of a particular real-life singer.

Finn admirably describes Skye as someone removed from the normal circumstances of life. She has obvious concerns about her career and her friends, but Finn never tries to infuse her fame-weariness with artificial relatability. It feels like a balancing act that borders on a magic trick: we can sympathize with her because Scott delivers an incredibly grounded and human performance, but Finn never asks us to connect with her too closely. We are witnesses to their history and do not imprint ourselves on it.

Part of this is thanks to the details the film includes about Skye's past. We learn how she hurt those around her long before the grinning apparitions appeared. We see how she tries to cope and hear about the tricks her therapist gave her. One particularly effective flashback even lets us see how dark things got for Skye before the film even began.

By letting us in on these finer aspects of Skye's life, Finn also allows us to create a larger narrative around her. Where the first film seemed like a few good ideas for scary movies, with a shaky plot and empty characters that were only meant to connect them, Smile 2Focusing on Skye and her story allows the horror to emerge naturally from this pursuit. And boy, does it even do that? The specificity of the plot does not force Finn to tell less interesting scary stories, but instead fuels his creativity and allows him to create more elaborate and spooky set pieces than anything in the original.

Smile 2 There are some fantastic scares in crowded arenas, but Finn finds the film's biggest scare in Skye's lavish apartment. He transforms the beautiful straight lines and 90-degree angles of the penthouse hallways into an endlessly shifting maze of corners with smiling visions lurking behind them, making for some of the most inventive and entertaining jump scares of any film this year. In the best of these apartment scenes, Skye's home is invaded by smiling backup dancers who assume their bizarre, contorted positions every time her back is turned. It's the perfect embodiment of a balance between scary and silly, a balance that Finn strikes again and again, each time to enormous effect.

More importantly, aside from the occasional silliness, Smile 2 it's really funny too. Humor was sorely missed in the first film, which all too often seems dull compared to its grinning monsters. Smile 2On the other hand, he recognizes that a certain amount of humor is essential to empathize with the bleak world of a haunted superstar. It's another example of Finn letting his narrative and his main character shape the atmosphere of the film, rather than the other way around.

This character-centered narrative approach is present throughout the film, but it is particularly effective Smile 2Hallucination sequences. As in the first film, once a victim has been infected, the Curse of the Smile causes them to see a distorted version of reality. The original film uses this dynamic to present one version of events and then pull the rug out from under us to shock us with another, be it a character with a menacing grin who was never actually there, or our hero who stabs an attacker only to realize she accidentally attacked a friend. In the first film, this cinematic bait-and-switch made for a few good jumps, but mostly it felt cheap: we never really knew enough about the protagonist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), to know what it meant to see things through to her end eyes, or to know what specific insecurities the curse was trying to foment in these visions. That's definitely not the case in the sequel.

Each of Skye's hallucinations revolves closely around a specific person or group that she fears will abandon. Since they all focus on different people in their lives, each of these scenes has a unique structure: Finn allows the tension to build organically until it tips over into horrifying unreality, like the confrontation late in the film that feels like a run-of-the-mill shouting match, until it suddenly goes one step too far. This gives each vision its own twist, turning each one into a maddening guessing game for the audience as they ponder what's real and what's not – and it all leads to a reveal that feels like the perfect climax to the series' premise .

Not only do these hallucinations create much more effective scares and frightening scenes, but they also make the film's thematic direction more impactful. The first film is perhaps the worst example yet of modern horror films' overuse of trauma metaphors – in fact, it's the original Smile even went so far as to have a character literally explain on screen that the real curse was trauma. The sequel dispenses with this comparison and also with any explanation of the curse. In doing so, Finn creates a compelling metaphor for how addiction distances people from their loved ones and the world around them. It's understated (until a particularly frustrating moment near the end of the film) and therefore far more effective than anything in the original film.

Smile Escaping the streaming abyss and achieving box office success felt like a miracle, but Smile 2 is something even rarer: a horror sequel that surpasses its predecessor in every way. Instead of simply rehashing the original, Parker Finn takes its clever premise to its logical extreme and builds up some incredibly creepy scenes to go with it. In fact, Finn ends Smile 2 in a spot that feels like the perfect conclusion to the franchise – and the perfect launching point for the career of one of the most exciting horror directors of his generation.

Smile 2 hits theaters on October 18th.