“Smile 2” delves deeper into the interplay of trauma, mental health, and horror, amplifying the original’s terror and emotional anguish.
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I’m grinning ear to ear. Not because I’ve been cursed, but because Smile 2 was such a phenomenal sequel to the movie that first brushed up against my scars so strongly. Smile took jump scares and flipped the script, making them meaningful instead of the hollow “gotcha” moments we often get startled by.
I’m writing this review from the angle of a current trauma patient who has undergone prolonged exposure therapy with great success. Prolonged Exposure is a sort of torture; the cure seems worse than the disease at first if you’ve seen any videos.
Smile, like repeating your trauma in real time, forces you to gaze agonizingly into the face of pain while trying not to break down.
To me, the scares in these films represent hypervigilance, that feeling like everyone is watching you when you’re out and about. I see Smile 2 as its own form of prolonged exposure for audiences riled up by the first film—not just scaring us but terrorizing us. This was a soothingly scary watch for me as I curled up with my darkest memories.
Stunning camera work complements special effects and jaw-dropping performances.
You could have someone suddenly leaping towards you or inching, and the camera eats up the story from every angle, guiding you in and out of the intensity of each scene. Classically inverting itself like the original, the upside-down camera lives in Smile 2.
Kyle Gallner has always been a star and one of my favorite scream kings; he returns to the character of Joel with the same level of care and conscience regardless of screen time. Naomi Scott, as lead, is a stunner. The emotional range is an understatement as Scott rides the pendulum back and forth through tumultuous sadness and an even sharp sensation of fear. She effortlessly embodies Skye’s will to live and the deep wounds that make her feel like dying.
Practical and special effects pair nicely to create a bloody cinematic mess with kills you won’t forget and trails of blood you’re scared to follow.
A somewhat gorier feature with more blood and similarly high tension, this sequel is not to be ignored in what it brings to the table. Where the first approached it straight from the mental health perspective, the sequel focuses on art and the emotion of music, songs laid bare to tackle pain. Using art to display how the demon and Skye’s emotions wreak havoc on her was a brilliant play. Now, to the trauma.
I told myself if I looked away, I’d be dishonoring the story, but just barely in, I was tested.
This movie hits the jackpot at delivering a mental health message.
It practically beats the message into you, from the song lyrics to the scares, which are sometimes plausibly realistic in a terrifying sense, like Skye’s super fan.
I see that moment where the smile takes control, and everything in me feels like and thinks it looks like a severe panic attack. Have you ever gotten so scared you choked? Hyperventilated so intensely you blacked out? I see this gagging, choking, fearful hold in their last moments as they fight the smile and see the definition of panic.
This film claimed more lives than the last and shows that simply seeing something terrible has immense power over our minds and how they operate. It seems that merely seeing something shouldn’t mean it has power over you, but memory is near eternal, and those thoughts lurk. Be it scars on your body and mind or a delusion that everyone around you doesn’t love you, much like Skye, you hold trauma like a passenger inside you as it stalks your thoughts, and trauma feeds on your pain, perpetuating more.
Smile 2 is a salient follow-up to the original, taunting us with the one thing in the world we sometimes feel we can’t do: curl those lips and grin back at the darkness.
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