When you are a mega pop star, you’re constantly surrounded by people. People who want you to succeed, people who want to hurt you, people that are full on stalkers. Writer-director Parker Finn took the reality of what it’s like to be famous and infused it into his world of Smile, where a demonic entity takes over your mind until you’ve passed it on to someone else. It is clear that this franchise can be versatile in its story telling and room for it to become an anthology of sorts, with new stories of people who have encountered the entity as we come into this sequel with a new cast and plot.

In this next installment, Finn takes the contained premise of the first film to the world stage with Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is about to go on tour for the first time in over a year since a tragic car accident that left her boyfriend, Paul Hunter (Ray Nicholson), dead and her to deal with back pain, scars and anxiety that she tries to hide from the world. When she goes to see her friend (Lukas Gage) to get pills for her pain, she witnesses him bashing his smiling face in with a weight, sparking her spiraling descent into madness in front of the world. Scott delivers a stellar performance as someone trying to make a comeback while battling her own demons and is now faced with a very real demon that makes it hard for her to know the difference between reality and what might just be in her head. No stranger to musical films, as she’s starred in a few of them such as Aladdin (2019) and Lemonade Mouth (2011), Scott is mesmerizing during her on stage performances and immerses viewers into the world of Skye Riley effortlessly. And in the dark corners of her apartment when faced with the taunting entity, we can’t help but be captivated by her overwhelming fear. While Scott gives us an impactful performance, her character lacks depth needed for us to empathize and connect with her beyond the surface.

We get this peek into Riley’s life and what has gotten her to this moment in her life. Her addiction to drugs and alcohol, losing her boyfriend in an accident she caused, losing her best friend, all of these elements that have her fighting to get her life back. Once she encounters the Smile Entity, her overbearing mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) and her overzealous assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), do all they can to prevent her from spiraling again. But after this intense, maddening journey we come to the end to a gotcha! moment, that makes everything we just experienced feel meaningless and cheap. I’ve got to give Finn credit for taking such a contained narrative from the first film and transforming it into something that is relevant and evolved. Though I do feel his ideas were more complex than needed.

Finn delivers as a director and does not hold back. Smile 2 is more violent, bloodier, and even more of a mind boggling psychological horror than its predecessor. From peeling faces to a full on display of the demon at work, the practical and special effects are more of a focus in this film- and it pays off. Even the camerawork tells a story, bridging the plot and the characters while we watch the immense insanity that is layered within the threads of the narrative. Something that Finn carries over from the first film is the focus on the sound design, which is front and center in this film as well with an eerie and unsettling score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who worked with Finn on the first Smile. The film also has a host of jump scares with loud out-of-nowhere booms and sudden crashes that sometimes don’t quite land, giving us the predictability we’ve come to recognize in this genre.

Finn took what worked in the first film and expanded on the themes and concepts, putting the larger budget to work. I think it’s safe to say that Smile 2 has solidified the franchise as a win. With newly established rules and an open ending, there is room for Finn to take Smile Entity even further.

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