Smile 2
Brian Eggert

Review by Brian Eggert Patron

Smile 2 2024

★★★

Watched 15 Oct 2024

Rinse, recycle, repeat. That’s writer-director Parker Finn’s approach to Smile 2, his sequel to his 2022 hit. Paramount Pictures couldn’t resist fast-tracking another one after the original earned $217 million at the box office on a $17 million budget. Finn delivers precisely that—just another one about a monster that passes from person to person through witnessed trauma. The victim is then “systemically infected, possessed, and murdered by some metaphysical being,” as one character explains in a moment that feels written for the trailer. With the entity intent on driving the protagonist to the brink with hallucinations—often in the form of people with a sinister smile—the movie deploys a familiar array of maddening situations that find Naomi Scott’s character losing her grip on reality. Thanks to Finn’s evident formal control and a much larger budget, Smile 2 may not deepen its predecessor’s mythology but reproduces the same material with confidence and potent results. And much like the first one, the sequel delivers a few chilling and memorably gory scenes wrapped in an atmosphere of relentless dread and paranoia.

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