Reviewed by Alicia Glass

After being corrupted by the smile entity curse, global singing sensation Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) begins experiencing terrifying visions and strange events, forcing her to try to fight back against the pressures of superstardom and her own past demons, before it’s entirely too late!

So, the first ten minutes or so of the film deal with the transference of the smile curse, demonic haunting, wtfever you want to call it, being foisted off on some other poor slob. At least, that was the theory our gunman was operating under, but as we’re all aware, the smile curse has a tendency to make things go awry as much as possible, maximizing pain and fear for consumption. And junkies aren’t exactly known for their ability to make nefarious plans and pull them off without a hitch anyways.

Meet Skye Riley, the former rising singing mega-superstar who, a year ago or so, allowed herself to succumb to drugs under the intense pressures of stardom and suffered a devastating car crash in which her actor “boyfriend” died and Skye herself endured massive injuries that left bad scars. Her former best friend and handler Gemma (Dylan Gelula) was inevitably blamed for outing Skye’s drug use, yet Gemma turns out to be the one person Skye really wants to talk to when the smile entity begins really beating her over the head. Skye’s mom Elizabeth (Rosemarie Dewitt) has taken over managerial duties of Skye’s resurging career, and obsessively goads Skye into event after event, as they prepare to launch a comeback tour for Skye. Darius (Raul Castillo) and Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) are both in Skye’s performing sphere too, as a co-managerial type and the new personal assistant, respectively. And of course there’s Lewis Fregoli (Lukas Gage), who we met in the beginning, a twitchy little drug dealer from Skye’s past who is ultimately responsible for visiting the smile curse upon Skye’s head. Thanks a lot, everybody.

Skye has problems ya’ll, even now. She endures dance and singing practice that causes her massive amounts of pain she’s supposed to hide; she drinks water like a beached fish because a therapist told her to drink water anytime she felt like using drugs again, hoo boy; she gets so twitchy she starts pulling out whole hanks of her hair so now Skye has a brand-new much shorter hairstyle in theory to celebrate her new world tour; and Skye is trying very hard to hide the car accident scars, which is seriously hard in those skimpy ridiculously revealing outfits megastars wear when performing onstage. So finally, in a desperate act that sadly everyone saw coming, Skye goes by herself to see Lewis in his rather obvious drug-dealer loft, to score some Vicodin for her back. Really. That’s all, Skye swears.

The smile entity has now moved into Skyes’ entire world, as if things weren’t stressful enough, and now Skye is starting to twitch herself, when she sees that horrific smile split the mouths of strangers and even people she knows, and hears words cursing her delivered in a voice clearly not belonging to the person whose mouth they’re coming out of.

The scenes with the various characters haunting Skye in the smile curse fashion are all great, very similar to the original film but smartened up for the sequel, slick and polished and absolutely sick in the reveling of scaring a person literally out of their mind. The scene with Skye’s backup dancers in her bedroom in particular, are incredibly well done and should be lauded tons.

Skye is trying to hold onto whats left of her sanity by her very fingernails when she finally agrees to meet with the anonymous person who’s been sending her eerie phone messages, Morris (Peter Jacobson). Morris actually does his best to try and explain the smile entity and its adjoining curse, and how the best way to stop the thing is to briefly “kill” Skye, though he seems to be twitchy and nervous for his own reasons too.  

Time is running out for poor beleaguered Skye, and after a devastating and very-bloody act that shatters what’s left of Skye’s dwindling mind, Skye makes the choice to try and fight the smile entity with every resource at her disposal. Somehow it never occurred to her that a walk-in freezer in a former Pizza Hut would be listed among those resources, but whatever!

The movie is full of jump scares and gore, yes, but the scenes are much less torture porn for the sake of it and more psychological horror presented in a visceral way that even still manages to leave a fair bit open to audience interpretation. Did Skye really just truth vomit all of that repressed rage aloud, or is it all pretty much in her head? That final concert battle scene, where there were hundreds of people in the live audience and in theory much more to be had from the live televised event, does this mean the smile entity has access now to a legion of potential victims?

Enjoy a villain who absolutely revels in being as evil as possible while sporting a terrifying mouth-splitting smile, Smile 2 is in theaters now!