Spoilers for “Smile 2” follow.
By necessity, “Smile 2” remixes director Parker Finn’s original film. “Smile” concluded with lead Rose (Sosie Bacon) succumbing to her curse; the smiling demon possessed and murdered her, passing itself onto Rose’s ex Joel (Kyle Gallner). After a cold opening resolving Joel’s fate, “Smile 2” jumps to our round two antiheroine: pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott).
The original “Smile” was about a therapist’s own mental health unraveling. By switching protagonists, “Smile 2” takes on a new theme, but one also as old as the movies: the psychic torture of fame. It’s impossible to watch Skye and not think of real female celebrities like Britney Spears who were chewed up and spit out by tabloid media and impossible expectations.
Even before the smiling demon shows up, Skye is feeling uneasy, as if she’s balancing on the top loop of a spiral. A recovering addict who barely survived a car crash, she’s been wheeled out for a redemption tour by her stage mom (Rosemarie DeWitt).
The camera, and the performances they capture, are always on for Skye even when she leaves the stage. At a signing event for her fans, her smile (heh) looks more and more pained with each annoying fan she has to talk to. Even without the demon showing up, she gets a real fright from a long-haired, splotchy-skinned stalker professing his “love” to her.
The story and scares of “Smile 2” feel indebted to classic anime “Perfect Blue,” another horror film about an unraveling pop star. My praise for “Perfect Blue” is superlative but I promise it’s not hyperbolic. It’s the best animated horror film ever made and, frankly, one of cinema’s most jaw-dropping directorial debuts. None of Satoshi director Kon’s later films, great as they are, hit me quite the same.
“Perfect Blue” lead Mima, like Skye, deals with a stalker and reality collapsing around her. The scene where Skye comes closest to hers feels extremely shaded with the colors of “Perfect Blue.”
Perfect Blue is the perfect pop star horror film
Described as if Alfred Hitchcock made a film for Disney by Roger Corman, “Perfect Blue” begins with Mima as a Japanese pop-idol in a three-girl band CHAM! The group’s hit “Angel of Love” is as much an earworm as Skye’s “New Brain.”
Mima is naive (much more so than Skye); she’s not falling down familiar paths but is instead a wide-eyed novice, listening to her managers and bosses for fear of disappointing them. So, despite being comfortable in pop music, she moves into more adult ventures, like acting in a crime thriller TV series and nude modeling.
Her biggest fan, “Me-Mania” (Masaaki Ōkura), doesn’t appreciate this and decides he’ll kill her to rescue the “real” Mima, his idolized madonna. It can be cheap to call a film “prescient” but “Perfect Blue” earns it. It terrifyingly depicts how the internet changed fandom from long-distance admiration into obsessive parasocial relationships. When we first meet Me-Mania, he’s watching Mima perform with CHAM! on-stage. He reaches out and takes the sight of her in like a figurine resting on his hand, because even when his hand isn’t there, that’s the only way he sees Mima.
Skye’s stalker isn’t so relentless, but the demon makes him appear so. As in the first film, the smile monster can warp the perception of its victims, making them see elaborate hallucinations. One of Skye’s earlier, and scariest ones, is when she’s in her apartment. She notices a trail of discarded clothes, stretching piece-by-piece down her darkened bedroom hallway. Then her naked stalker (barely) steps into the light, smiling. He charges at Skye, who runs, and when she turns around he’s gone.
One of the film’s other major setpieces happens in Skye’s apartment, when the smile demon manifests as a crowd. Moving in sync as if a multi-limbed beast, the crowd grabs and begins tearing Skye apart. The stalker, unseen but identifiable by the red patches on his skin, stretches his arm down her throat.
Both Perfect Blue and Smile 2 tear apart reality
In the end, Skye is the one who kills her fans. The film ends with her on stage as the demon takes control and bashes Skye’s face in with her microphone, killing her and spreading its curse to a stadium full of people. The first “Smile” was a particularly brutal entry in the “it’s actually about trauma” horror canon; its ending inferred that our wounds never fully heal and battling depression or mental illness is a losing fight. “Smile 2” carries that theme through — the demon brags “I’m in control” when Skye tries to vanquish it.
That leads to the film’s final twist, that almost the entire third act was yet another hallucination. “Smile 2” leans on this trick too often and this twist goes too far, keeping the movie from sticking the landing after a mostly steady flight. You’re left wondering what was real, not because you’re unsettled but because you’re confused. “All just a dream” is often the hackiest ending a storyteller can use.
“Perfect Blue” pulls some similar tricks. Some scenes are set up to be real, but turn out to be scenes-within-scenes from Mima’s star vehicle, “Double Bind.” About halfway through, the film (repeatedly) jumps from scenes to Mima waking up back in her room. But beneath the reality-twisting, “Perfect Blue” all fits together. Once you know what’s going on, it becomes quite easy to follow on rewatch. While the two films share similar themes and set-pieces, “Smile 2” struggles with both surprising and satisfying its audience in a way Kon’s film never does.
“Smile 2” is playing in theaters.
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