Portraying the life of a pop star diva — or at least doing so convincingly — is not the easiest thing a film achieves. There are too many real-life counterparts. Director Brady Corbett (“The Brutalist”), teaming with Natalie Portman, is about halfway through the Vox Lux film. Lady Gaga draws on elements of her own legend but is smart enough to play the heroine of “A Star Is Born.” no A copy of her, creating a character for the ages. Lately, it seemed like M. Night Shyamalan was making “Trap” mostly to let his budding musician daughter, Salica Shyamalan, embody the pop diva — which she did confidently in concert, but less convincingly backstage. So when you hear that “Smile 2,” the sequel to Parker Finn’s poignant horror film two years ago, is centered around a pop star, you might not exactly expect a deep immersion in pop music. The world of music.
The first “Smile” movie was, after all, a movie in which people were possessed by a strange demon, causing them to collapse over the course of a week, at which point they would flash a sly, nightmarish smile at someone else and proceed to commit suicide right in front of them, at which point the demon entered. To the body of the person who witnessed the suicide. complicated! Or maybe just crooked. The premise of “Smile” made perfect sense, as the host-hopping demon was a descendant of “It Follows” and (back in the 1980s) “The Hidden.” However, the film, which was clearly presented, often seemed merely a vehicle to glorify all those self-mutilating dead people and frozen rictus smiles.
“Smile 2” is different. It’s all those things, but it’s a horror film that strives to create a real emotional center. And that’s because it really is on A pop star-idol dance queen named Skye Riley (played with “yes she really could be one” authenticity by British actress and singer Naomi Scott), who from the beginning fends off demons that are all too human. A year ago, drug-addled Skye was seriously injured in a car accident that killed her movie star boyfriend. Since then, she’s been in recovery (quite literally), and is about to launch a comeback tour. We see her reintroducing herself to her fans with an appearance in the movie “Drew” (in which Drew Barrymore plays her), where she shows off Edie Sedgwick’s new hairstyle along with her air of punishing arrogance.
The film sticks to Skye’s point of view and takes us through her life – the rehearsals and costume changes, the guzzling of Voss water bottles, her bickering relationship with her doting and parasitic manager mother (Rosemary DeWitt), and her mother. An increasingly severe case of trichotillomania, the hair-tearing drive, and the parade of her fans lining up to take their turn to take “badass” selfies with her. Almost every scene in “Smile 2” is imbued with the awareness that being a 21st-century pop star means acting like you’re in an industry: a never-ending exercise in corporate image management.
Sometimes, when you look at someone like Ariana Grande or Olivia Rodrigo, it’s not hard to see the vulnerable human behind the cultivated star facade. Naomi Scott, in “Smile 2,” shows you both. As Skye grapples with a demon that has invaded her, combined with memories of that nightmarish car accident, not to mention all the devastation her selfishness has caused (this demon likes to have some built-in mental torment to work with), her life and career begin to unravel. But to everyone around her, who can’t see the devil, she seems to be having a breakdown. And in a way, maybe it is. “Smile 2” is a short horror story, but the story it tells is that pop fame makes you crazy. The film is not at all accurate, but Parker Finn is a clever enough filmmaker to make reality seem like a hallucination and the hallucinations seem like reality.
The smile, as before, can come from almost anywhere (such as the teenage girl wearing braces in the fan queue), but it most often comes from someone close to Skye. This can be as unsettling as a fear of jumping. The horror begins when she goes to visit Louis (Lucas Gage), an old high school friend who is now a high-end drug dealer. High on cocaine, he becomes a talkative head case and proceeds to kill himself by bashing his face in with a 35-pound circular exercise weight. It’s all very garish, but then Skye hooks up with Gemma (Dylan Gelula), the unassuming friend she dumped when she was at the height of her drug craze. We’re drawn to their reunion at Skye’s flat, so we’re not expecting Gemma to show The Smile. One of the film’s shocking highlights is when Skye visits her backup dancers in a sequence that would make Bob Fosse smile from his grave.
When Skye is asked to be the presenter of a children’s benefit programme, she has to read a prepared letter from a Teleprompter, which turns into a literal bad dream, pushing her over the edge. The scene reaches its climax when her late boyfriend takes to the stage flashing The Smile (that Ray Nicholson is the actor son of Jack Nicholson makes him genetically predisposed to do so well). When you attack this mirage by pushing the wrong person off stage, it is a moment of the purest moments of funny satire.
The best thing about “Smile 2” is that it keeps the audience off balance, starting with the way Cristobal Tapia de Fer’s unsettling electronic score works over us. Skye’s story is full of doors constantly opening into her repressed reality, and Naomi Scott plays this with great skill. She’s not just a flogging girl in horror films – we develop a sympathetic understanding of Skye and her predicament, which is that she is surrounded by healers but feels more and more alone. By the time she goes to the bar to meet Maurice (Peter Jacobson), who has a plan to defeat the devil, she just has to agree to let her heart stop for two minutes! -The sudden onslaught of fans wanting to link to her on TikTok seems as nightmarish as anything in the movie.
However, by the time Skye finds herself in the freezer of an abandoned Pizza Hut to pursue Morris’ plan, the film has become too divided and drawn out for its own good. The ending is destined to leave the audience scratching their heads, because Parker Finn, who has now come to love the “Smile” legend he created, becomes stilted about it. The film reaches its climax with body horror to the max combined with minimal logic. Even then, though, he extracts honest jolts from the unnerving hothouse of unreality that is pop stardom.