In the Flesh: Smile 2

You don’t usually see good fake pop music. Think of the dead-eyed, lifeless numbers in Shyamalan’s Trap from earlier this year, so non-specific they barely register as music at all, or even the name of the performer, Lady Raven, so clearly at odds with the blandly fun and peppy public image she projects. Smile 2, by contrast, makes you believe that half your friends could be obsessed with Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) and, by some weird twist of fate, you just haven’t heard of her. She’s so believable in the role, the film’s portrayals of her rehearsals, costuming, and management so naturalistic and effortless, that one can’t help but think of Ke$ha, Brittany, and all the other talented young women chewed up and spat out by an industry with no interest in their humanity and no incentive to change its predatory outlook. The controlling mother (played here with impressive restraint by Rosemary DeWitt), the meltdowns at phony charity events, the coke binges and dysfunctional relationships — Smile 2 isn’t reinventing the wheel when it comes to stories about starlets going to pieces, but it’s playing the hits with aplomb.

Scott is terrific as the erratic, demanding, exploited Riley, a woman who has never been allowed — or allowed herself — to mature out of adolescence. She has a strong edge of pure nastiness, crazed and vicious, that prevents her from feeling too passive or too purely sympathetic, and by the time the film wins us over to her it feels genuinely earned. This is a woman we want to see survive not because she’s innocent, or perfect, or deserving, but because she’s so fully and completely a human. Finn’s camera does great work at conveying just how hunted and deranged Riley feels, gliding along behind her like a hungry ghost, placing us in her perspective or just ahead of it during moments of intense chaos and struggle, giving us a sense for the interior of her demanding and frenetic world. He also plays with the thematic weight of her image as a public figure in a sharp, intelligent way, mirroring her early appearance on Drew in which she gives a series of pat, canned remarks about recovery and healing with a truly miserable sequence in which she finally stands up for herself only to discover that it’s too late, that her own actions have become purely symbolic and gestural. 

There are perhaps a few too many jumpscares, but the bar for quality there is high enough that it doesn’t bring things down appreciably. It’s the more drawn-out scares where the film really shines. Riley in her apartment, pursued by dozens of grinning phantoms who whirl and shove her through a grisly rendition of the number she’s currently workshopping with her dance team. Riley on stage with her own demonic double, staring in horror as it unfolds along the line of her abdominal scar into a grotesque twelve-foot puppet like something out of a Trevor Henderson illustration. Her flashback to the disgusting, coked-up fight she and her actor boyfriend have prior to the disastrous accident that destroyed her career (an accident she caused in a moment of rage, we learn) is a wonderful piece of tension-building, as is the opening sequence in which Joel (Kyle Gallner), sole survivor of the previous film, attempts to pass his curse on to a gang member only for the entire plan to explode in his face. In short, Smile 2 is solid, specific horror, discarding the bland generalities of the first film in favor of laser-specific and much nastier insights into fame, the cult of pop fandom, and interpersonal desolation.