By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt and Lukas Gage
Written and directed by Parker Finn
Paramount
The first SMILE made such great use of a simple freeze-your-blood gambit (which was right there in the title) that a follow-up film, like so many in the genre, ran the risk of either settling into a repetitive rut or losing the qualities that made its predecessor a success. Yet returning writer/director Parker Finn ably overcomes the sophomore jinx and delivers a sequel that stays true to the initial inspiration while finding a new, and significantly bigger, story to tell. SMILE 2 is ALIENS to the original’s ALIEN, in scale if not quite in impact.
Even as the milieu is grander, SMILE 2 works because it keeps a tight focus on one beleaguered protagonist in the middle of it all, pop singer Skye Riley (Naomi Scott). Before we get to her, though, Finn has a loose end to tie up, and the new movie begins “Six Days Later” to show us what happens to the last significant character left standing from SMILE. This entails a dynamic, breath-stopping long-take sequence with a couple of genuine jump-from-your-seat beats, setting the right tone of edgy unease. Right from this start, Finn and his returning collaborators, including cinematographer Charlie Sarroff and composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, plunge us into a world in which nothing and no one can be trusted, and scary surprises seem to be around every corner.
The visuals and soundscape venture into the surreal at numerous moments once Skye’s story takes center stage (no pun intended). She’s in the midst of preparing for a comeback tour a year after an auto accident claimed the life of her boyfriend, film star Paul Hudson (played by Ray Nicholson, since under the ensuing circumstances, his demise in no way means he’s out of her life). Still dealing with both emotional and physical scars and lingering pain from that incident, she sneaks out to score Vicodin from old high-school friend and dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), and finds him more wired than usual. He thinks someone or something is after him, and then flashes that rictus grin and kills himself in a brutally showy manner before Skye’s horrified eyes–which, as anyone who saw the first movie knows, means that a horrible curse has been passed on to her.
Soon, the endless pressures of a young star’s life, as Skye is pushed and pulled from all sides by her colleagues, fans and controlling mother Elizabeth (Rosemary DeWitt), pale in comparison to the living nightmare her existence becomes. Scott, the actress/singer previously seen in more benign fare like the live-action ALADDIN and more recent CHARLIE’S ANGELS, gives a hell of a performance in SMILE 2, conveying Skye’s star power when she’s on the job and her deeply wounded humanity when she’s not, as well as her stark terror as she’s confronted by a series of freakily smiling visages. Since they’re manifestations of a demon that only she can see, the people around Skye believe her increasingly hysterical reactions are a result of her falling back into drug and alcohol abuse–not a new idea in horror, but also not one often enacted in such an intense and painfully evocative manner.
Even as the supernatural takes hold of Skye’s being, Finn stages scenes that play effectively on common, everyday fears and concerns, as when Skye, who’s been guilted into taking part in a charity event she’s not emotionally prepared for, finds herself on stage with a faulty Teleprompter and no idea what to say. There are sneaky bits of humor (a shot of a cocaine-strewn table as an offscreen weatherman reports on “the first snow of the season,” the tattoo Skye sports behind her ear) and other moments throughout that humanize the circumstances. While the movie plays rather fast and loose with the rules of the demon, and how (and how much) it can manifest physically, Finn and Scott keep everything grounded in Skye’s plight and her desperate attempts to extricate herself from it.
The writer/director also avoids falling into the sequel trap of trying to overexplicate his central threat, while working in a few surprises, like the real meaning behind a couple of text messages that at first appear to be threatening. And he maintains the original’s central theme of his parasitic demon feeding on human trauma, which provides a dramatic, thematic core for the film’s many jittery, jumpy scares and startling bloodshed (courtesy of makeup effects artists Jeremy Selenfriend and Brian Spears). He gets the real-world details right, too; this is a much more persuasive portrayal of the pop-music milieu than was seen in M. Night Shyamalan’s TRAP earlier this year. If this is the last time Finn explores this particular idea (and it’s good enough to make one anxious to see what else he can come up with), he’s going out on a high note.
