Smile 2 is the rare sequel that’s better than the original in every way

The original Smile felt like a miracle when it was released in 2022: a well-crafted, decidedly solid horror movie plucked from the obscure hell of direct-to-streaming release and turned into a genuine box-office hit. But for all its commercial success, Smile could never escape the fact that it started life as an excellent short film that got stretched to feature length. The full-length movie has a few good scares, but it’s more a promise of something great than it is great on its own. For the sequel, writer-director Parker Finn makes good on every bit of that promise. Smile 2 is bigger, scarier, funnier, smarter, darker, and undeniably better than its predecessor.

Smile 2 opens with a masked gunman taking a drug dealer hostage, then desperately attempting to kill his captive while the hostage’s associate watches. It’s a clever reintroduction to the franchise’s homicidal virus, which manifests as a malicious ear-to-ear grin, but it’s also a tremendous display of confidence from Finn. The sequence — which is more action than horror — is mostly handled in just one shot, with the camera movements and action precisely choreographed to catch each minor detail and keep us tight on the action. By the time the title card drops, with a reminder that this will be a particularly gory ride, it’s already clear we’re in expert hands.

The rest of the film stays tightly focused on international pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is preparing to mount a massive comeback tour one year after a horrible car accident, which marked the low point in her battle with addiction. Just days before the tour is set to kick off, she visits an old friend who acts erratically, then suddenly kills himself in front of her, infecting her with the Smile curse and setting off all the horrible, unraveling hallucinations that make this franchise tick.

Using the world of a pop superstar is a perfect step forward for Smile’s creepy premise, but it also feels like a bit of metatextual playfulness from Finn. It’s an acknowledgement that his franchise has hit the big time, and he can upgrade from the first movie’s anonymous main character to someone who sells out (fictional) arenas. And Skye really is the selling point in Smile 2. Finn’s script builds out a nuanced, interesting version of a pop star, someone far enough removed from real-life signifiers to feel like a fully realized character instead of a cheap shot at any particular real-life singer.

Finn admirably writes Skye as someone removed from the normal walks of life. She has concerns we can recognize, about her career and her friends, but Finn never tries to imbue her weariness of fame with synthetic relatability. She feels like a balancing act verging on a magic trick: We can sympathize with her because Scott gives an incredibly grounded and human performance, but Finn never asks us to relate too closely to her. We’re witnessing her story, not imprinting ourselves onto it.

Part of this is thanks to the details the film weaves in about Skye’s past. We learn all the ways she’s hurt the people around her long before the grinning apparitions appeared. We see the ways she tries to cope, and hear about tricks her therapist has given her. One particularly effective flashback even lets us know just how dark things got for Skye before the movie even began.

Letting us in on these finer points of Skye’s life also lets Finn create a more fully realized narrative around her. Where the first film felt like a few good ideas for scares with a ramshackle plot and blank characters merely designed to connect them, Smile 2’s focus on Skye and her story lets the horror flow naturally out of that pursuit. And boy, does it ever. The plot specificity doesn’t pin Finn into less interesting scares — instead, it fuels his creativity, letting him create more elaborate and creepier set pieces than anything in the original.

Smile 2 features a few fantastic moments of fright set in crowded arenas, but Finn finds all the movie’s best terror in Skye’s lavish apartment. He turns the gorgeous straight lines and the 90-degree angles of penthouse hallways into an endlessly shifting maze of corners for smiling visions to lurk behind, providing some of the most inventive and enjoyable jump scares of any movie this year. In the best of these apartment-set sequences, Skye finds her home invaded by smiling backup dancers who shift and morph into bizarre, contorted positions every time her back is turned. It’s the perfect embodiment of a balance between creepy and silly, a balance Finn manages to find again and again, to tremendous effect each time.

More importantly, though, occasional silliness aside, Smile 2 is also genuinely funny. Humor was sorely missed in the first movie, which is too often borderline stodgy by comparison with its grinning monsters. Smile 2, on the other hand, recognizes that a certain degree of humor is essential to us buying into the bleak world of a haunted superstar. It’s yet another example of Finn letting his narrative and main character shape the movie’s vibe, rather than the other way around.

This character-first storytelling approach is present everywhere in the film, but it’s crucially effective in Smile 2’s hallucination sequences. As with the first film, once the Smile curse has infected a victim, it causes them to see a distorted version of reality. The original movie uses that dynamic to present one version of events, then pull the rug out to shock us with another, whether it’s a character with a threatening grin who was never really there, or our hero stabbing an attacker, only to realize they’ve accidentally attacked a friend. In the first film, this cinematic bait-and-switch made for a few good jumps, but more often than not, it felt cheap: We never really knew enough about protagonist Rose (Sosie Bacon) to know what it means to see things through her ey​​es, or to know what specific insecurities the curse was trying to feed in these visions. That decidedly isn’t the case in the sequel.

Each of Skye’s hallucinations centers tightly on a specific person or group she’s scared to let down. Because they all focus on different people in her life, each of these scenes has a unique build: Finn lets the tension mount organically until it tips over into horrifying unreality, like the late-movie confrontation that feels like a perfectly normal screaming match, until it suddenly goes a step too far. This gives every vision a distinct flavor, turning each one into a demented guessing game for the audience as they consider what’s real and what isn’t — all leading to a reveal that feels like the perfect culmination of the series’ premise.

Aside from simply creating much more effective scares and startling scenes, these hallucinations also make the movie’s thematic thrust more effective. The first movie is perhaps the worst example yet of modern horror movies shoehorning in overwrought trauma metaphors — in fact, the original Smile went so far as to literally have a character explain on screen that the real curse is trauma. The sequel ditches that comparison, along with any explanation of the curse. In the process, Finn creates a compelling metaphor for the ways addiction distances people from their loved ones and the world around them. It’s understated (until one particularly frustrating moment at the end of the film), and by virtue, far more effective than anything in the original movie.

Smile dodging the streaming abyss and finding box-office success felt like a miracle, but Smile 2 is something even rarer: a horror sequel that outdoes its predecessor in every way. Rather than simply rehashing the original, Parker Finn pushes his clever premise to its logical extreme and builds some incredibly scary scenes to match. In fact, Finn ends Smile 2 in a spot that feels like the perfect conclusion to the franchise — and the perfect jumping-off point for the career of one of the most exciting horror directors of his generation.

Smile 2 debuts in theaters on Oct. 18.