Smile 2 (2024)

Smile 2 arrives as a sequel to a modestly budgeted horror hit and promptly upgrades the venue from psychiatric ward to pop-star arena. Naomi Scott plays Skye Riley, a global recording artist attempting a comeback tour while a smiling supernatural parasite dismantles her perception of reality. Parker Finn directs with a clean, cruel sense of escalation. The film is loud, expensive-looking, and committed to the idea that fame is a machine that chews its inhabitants and bills them for the dental work. It is a horror picture first and a commentary picture second, which is the correct order of operations.

The progressive content is present but mild, and the film treats it as texture instead of gospel. Scott headlines a reasonably diverse cast, though the movie never pauses to announce this as a milestone; the faces simply exist in the frame, and the frame moves on. Skye's ordeal carries a faint feminist charge, what with the controlling mother-manager and the Britney Spears-adjacent machinery of image repair, but the film converts that charge into jump scares instead of a thesis. The record industry backdrop supplies a cynical hum about commodification and audience complicity, and Finn's closing meta gesture asks whether we, the ticket buyers, are part of the problem. The question lands as a wink, not a sermon.

Other contemporary markers are absent or negligible. There is no LGBTQ subplot, no racial reckoning, no climate allegory, and no historical revision. Mental illness and addiction function as horror fuel, not as advocacy, and the body horror is punitive, not affirming. The film never stops for a lecture. It wants to pin you to the seat and make you grin uncomfortably. On that narrow, gruesome contract it delivers.