Written by Awais Fareed, Edited by Amelia Evans

Smile 2 (Parker Finn, 2024) was released a week prior to writing this. It, in my opinion, is a soulless cash grab of a film that hides behind gore, gratuitous jump scares and a lot of (sometimes cool) body horror. I feel like I may be in the minority of people who really dislike Smile 2 as it has already received much higher love and acclaim than the first, but I just couldn’t get into it at all.  

Admittedly, I am not the biggest fan of “trauma” horror because it is mostly always just soulless, plotless cinema that attempts and mostly fails at being anything meaningful or deep. Smile 2 is just another example of the failed “trauma” horror machine. It tries to differentiate from the original by giving us the character of global pop superstar, Skye Riley. Skye, played by Naomi Scott, who returns to the musician role but this time not in a film as good as Lemonade Mouth or even close to being worthy of her stellar performance. With Skye, the film leans into the aggressively overdone (sorry!) plot of the over-exploited superstar who cannot escape the cage of stardom. While this in itself is interesting and important to watch, Smile 2 handles its main plot point so poorly that the film just feels aimless.  

The film runs around the two hours mark and spends all that time on useless moments that never dig deeper or expand on anything at all. Not to get too into spoilers but a huge example of this is Skye’s trauma which is literally what the movie revolves around yet it never dives into it beyond surface level. We get a flashback of Skye arguing in the car with her boyfriend, Paul (played by Ray Nicholson, son of horror royalty Jack Nicholson) before getting into an accident that lands her in hospital and takes the life of her boyfriend. Yet this all feels so vague because they only show us 30 seconds of conversation and then nothing else for the remainder of the film. In this scene, Paul refers to Skye as a “psycho” which made me feel genuinely excited for the film to finally go deeper into Skye’s insecurities and self-hatred but it never did, the film refused to reveal what happened before this or why Skye feels the way she does. It just feels like an exact replica of a typical “trauma” horror film which brings absolutely nothing new to the table. I get that it’s a film, we aren’t supposed to know everything about a character in a limited time frame, but I wanted to know something!  Anything! I wanted to know more of why she feels this way about herself apart from the obligatory “I hate myself and my mind is a mess” scene because they never actually lead to anything. For a movie that is this long, it never actually tells us anything significant about our main character. Skye is your troubled surface level superstar that is only ever elevated to something more three dimensional by the stunningly amazing performance of Naomi Scott. Her character is never taken anywhere new or interesting by Parker Finn who simply rehashes overdone plot points of stardom without anything actually unique of his own to say. 

The film actually loses whatever it is trying to be or what it is trying to say about trauma, mental health and stardom and instead decides to simply bully its main character further and further into the dramatic denouement of the film. Smile 2 does not actually care enough about any of these issues health or the psychological exploration that could come out of such a unique main character and her internal struggle as much as it should. Even for horror, the film mistreats this mental health subplot so poorly and uses the gore and body horror not as a representation of this struggle or for any interesting purpose at all but just for shock. This would be fine if that wasn’t all the film had going for it, but by the end I was exhausted by all the boring and dumb jump scares. Even in Talk to Me (Michael Philippou and Danny Philippou, 2022), which is another trauma horror film that I am critical of, the gore serves a purpose and the representation of trauma is treated with a certain degree of respect that actually feels somewhat explored in a way that pushes the narrative forward. However, in Smile 2, the trauma only exists as something to make the film appear interesting and layered but it is never completely explored and this leaves its central character who we follow for over two hours feeling as flat and enigmatic as she did at the start.  

Skye experiences a huge moment of trauma around halfway through the runtime. This scene was built to be interesting but it’s where the film began to truly sour for me. It’s so overtly harsh in the way it prioritises being shocking and gory over telling us anything about Skye and what she has gone through. The scene truly begins in such an emotionally charged way but does not expand on a moment that could have given us so much insight into the films protagonist. Instead, you are drawn to how much of a spectacle it all is and how empty the scene feels to the overall film as you barely know anything about the context of the scene before it happens. Instead, the film chooses to attack its protagonist more and more to no avail and cruelly mocks her trauma and mental illness repeatedly for horror and shock.  

I know it sounds like I probably do not understand horror but usually, “trauma” horror does this in a way that has equilibrium. The pain the character endures has a reason or purpose to add to character development and their actual trauma and pain is described beyond a superficial level, sometimes just covertly but in a way where the viewer can truly understand it. There is no equilibrium in Smile 2, all the pain Skye goes through serves no purpose and just feels a bit excessive as it detracts from the build up to the finale. The way the film actually treats trauma and mental health deterioration comes across as insulting as it lacks this equilibrium and thus accidentally feels as if it just doesn’t care about these topics and uses them because it was the first thing they could think of. The film lacks what makes for a good horror film by not providing its protagonist with a sense of agency. Horrible things keep happening to Skye and she simply exists to just take them for the film’s entertainment. Even films like Terrifier 2 (Damien Leone, 2024) provide their protagonists with agency which therefore provides the film with higher stakes and makes it somewhat interesting to watch. There are no stakes in Smile 2 as everything that happens to Skye feels pre-determined and without any actual care or deeper thought and planning. It is as if Parker Finn wanted us to desperately hate Skye Riley and to not humanise her so we cannot care about the pain that she endures. Skye’s cannot fight against her fate as the film does not care about her enough to allow her to do that. It simply uses her struggles as something to make it stand apart from your average gory slasher, but it just makes it feel like there is no heart or emotion behind the film.  

I would love to go into a fuller analysis of Smile 2 but I cannot without spoiling too much. It is simply just a copy paste of the first film with some fun catchy songs and camera movements. If you like gore, body horror and jump scares, you’re better off watching something else. But if you must, Smile 2 has that in heaps.