[COLUMN] Smile 2 is About the Trauma of Celebrity | by Darren Mooney

NOTE: This article contains full spoilers for Parker Finn’s Smile 2, which is in cinemas now and is a good, fun, high-concept horror movie.

Smile 2 does what most sequels should aspire to do: it takes the core concept of the original film and escalates it in a way that manages to build on what came before while also saying something fresh about it. It’s a deft balancing act from returning writer and director Parker Finn, who feels much more comfortable behind the camera for the high-concept horror sequel.

The original Smile represented perhaps the apotheosis of a particular trend in contemporary horror cinema. A lot of recent genre work has been built around the idea of the central nightmare as a metaphor for trauma. Jamie Lee Curtis spent a considerable amount of the press tour for David Gordon Green’s Halloween sequels talking about how they were about “trauma”,  but they were far from the only example of the trend.

This contemporary trend also informed movies like Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, David Bruckner’s The Night House and Mike Flannigan’s Doctor Sleep among many others. Finn’s Smile was not the best of these movies, but it was perhaps the most explicitly literal. The monster at the center of the narrative was not so much a metaphor for the idea of trauma so much as it was the very embodiment of the idea.

Smile focused on Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a therapist scarred by the trauma of her own mother’s (Dora Kiss) death by overdose. Cotter works in an emergency facility, dealing with very unstable patients. One of these patients, Laura (Caitlin Stasey), talks about how she is being haunted by a mysterious entity that can take the form of people close to her, wearing an eerie smile. Laura breaks down. Using a shard from a broken vase, she carves a smile from her ear across her throat.

Rose is shocked by this gruesome suicide. However, over the next few days, she begins to experience her own strange hallucinations. Wrestling with the specter of mental illness hanging over her family, Rose digs into Laura’s history. Laura has witness the suicide of a college professor a week earlier, and that college professor had seen another woman take her own life shortly before that. It is a daisy chain of suicide, stretching back across at least twenty victims.

The only survivor of this curse is Robert Talley (Rob Morgan), an accountant who broke the chain by committing a murder. That seemed to be enough to pass on this monster. Rose claims to be visiting Talley on behalf of a patient. “Your patient is going to die unless she kills someone,” he explains. “That's the only way you can get rid of it. The only way. She has to make sure there's a witness for it to pass to, 'cause this thing needs trauma to spread. That's what gives it power. Trauma.” It is trauma, self-perpetuating.

Released in September 2022, Smile was in many ways the culmination of that trend of horrors about trauma, in that this was a monster that literally passed from person to person through a traumatizing act, manifesting itself through the sort of disorientation that is normally a consequence of trauma. It was not subtle. If anything, the film eschewed the nuance and complexity of many of these sorts of films, and instead just followed the trend to its logical conclusion. It was direct. It was simple. It was blunt force.

Smile 2 works as well as it does because it takes that grounding and premise, and pushes it in an interesting direction that manages to say something just a little more specific about the nature of trauma and the way that human beings process it, relate to it, and perpetuate it. Instead of focusing on a therapist, Smile 2 is built around popstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is mounting a comeback tour following her recovery from a horrific car accident and her battle with drug addiction.

Trying to score some Vicodin to help her cope with the pain in her back, Skye has to turn to her old school friend and drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), because no doctor is going to prescribe painkillers to a person with Skye’s history of addictive behavior. Lewis has been contaminated by the creature. He takes his own life in front of Skye, smashing his own skull in with a plate. In doing so, Lewis passes the monster on to Skye, whose life quickly begins to unravel.

The decision to build Smile 2 around a popstar works really well. Finn began his career making short films, and his biography at many of these horror festivals cites three major influences on his work: “Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch or Stephen King.” With its static framing and its symmetric compositions, Smile borrowed very heavily from Kubrick. Indeed, the eponymous facial expression is itself a Kubrick stare. As with a lot of the films made during the pandemic, there was a lot of eerie and uncanny negative space that lent the movie a Kubrickian texture.

In contrast, Smile 2 takes more of its visual cues from Lynch. The velvet curtains and the zigzag pattern of the carpet in Skye’s dressing room recalls the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, as does the film’s emphasis on cracked mirrors. It seems oddly appropriate that part of the movie’s climax finds two versions of Skye wrestling with one another, one blonde and one raven-haired, recalling the central Lynch premise: “what if there was a blonde woman but also there was a brunette woman?”

Smile 2 argues that fame is inherently disorienting. In Smile, the tension arose from the audience’s lack of familiarity with the beast. In Smile 2, with the audience already aware of how the concept works, Finn wrings a lot of tension from the question of what strange happenings are caused by the monster and which are just an inescapable part of being famous. There are several moments in the film when it seems like the monster is taunting Skye, but it is just a regular fan.

At an album signing, is the creepy and disgusting weirdo (Iván Carlo) who claims to know that Skye is “sad inside” a manifestation of the parasite or just a garden-variety creepy and disgusting weirdo? What about the little girl with braces who just stares silently and intensely at Skye? These figures initially seem like they must be the monster at work, but these are just the sorts of social encounters that Skye has everyday.

As such, Smile 2 asks the question: what does baseline reality even feel like to a popstar? Finn’s direction leans into this. Demonstrating considerably more confidence with the camera than he did in the original film, Smile 2 is packed with dazzling and disorienting long takes that often veer into the surreal and the absurd. While Smile was (somewhat ironically) a rather po-faced horror movie, Smile 2 is having a great deal more fun than the original film, leaning into the weirdness of it all.

Of course, Smile 2 is still a movie about trauma. However, it is exploring the idea from a different perspective. Smile 2 is about the public performance of trauma, and the difficulty in navigating personal grief and injury while also packaging that suffering for an audience’s consumption. Skye is introduced as a guest on The Drew Barrymore Show, another celebrity who has been through that wringer, talking about her accident and her sobriety.

There is a sense in which just the right amount of trauma makes Skye a marketable commodity. She is able to attract media attention and earn public sympathy by talking about her recent struggles in just the right way. However, there is a sense that this is more about making the public comfortable than it is with letting Skye work through her trauma. There is a very narrow band of acceptable conversation around the topic. Skye can be honest, but she needs to remain palatable.

At her fitting, Skye balks at the fact that her costume will reveal the scar down her stomach from the crash, even as her mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) insists that this is what her audience wants. The owner of her record company, Darius (Raúl Castillo), drafts Skye to talk at one of her charity fundraisers, but everybody gets uncomfortable the moment that she acknowledges her conflicting feelings about fame. Everybody is vocally sympathetic to Skye’s injuries and issues, but it is also made clear that she has no room to recover or decompress and cannot slow or delay the tour.

There is a recurring tension in Smile 2 over who owns Skye. This is expressed in very physical and literal terms. It is control over her body; at various points characters grab and pull at Skye, while the climax features another timely birth allegory as the creature tears its own into the world through the scar on her belly. In some grim sense, Skye’s body is not truly her own. As in The Substance, there is a tension between what Skye needs and what her body allows.

However, Skye is also engaged in a tug-of-war over control over her image. Smile 2 is filled with mirrors and reflections – even brass furnishings and marble floors are polished so that Skye can see herself in them. Often, the monster is either only visible inside the mirror or completely invisible to the mirror – sometimes what is in the mirror is real, and sometimes it’s not. This perhaps also true of Skye, who is so defined by others’ expectations of her that she is more a construct than a person.

It's debatable whether this subtext is any less obvious than the trauma metaphor that drove Smile. After all, there is an ongoing conversation about how the media (and fans) talk about celebrities, particularly female pop stars. With hindsight, pundits recognize how inappropriate they were in their coverage of Britney Spears, and how that spotlight traumatized a young woman. However, it also seems like they are destined to perpetuate that cycle with Chapell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter.

Indeed, Smile 2 builds to a climax that feels like a clever escalation of the movie’s central premise. Skye takes to the stage for the first night of her world tour, and the creature takes control. Using her microphone as a bludgeon, Skye takes her life in front of an audience of thousands of traumatized fans. The film is ambiguous about what this means for the creature. Is everyone who witnessed the event now infected? Or is there only ever one host? That is perhaps a question best left to Smile 3.

However, taken on its own terms, the ending serves as a capstone to the film’s themes. There is a sense in which this unending cycle of building up and tearing down these idols as a form of public spectacle is its own form of trauma. Through mass media, this violence is amplified and spread, broadcast across the world. The destruction of young women like Skye Riley (or, more literally, Britney Spears) as a means of popular entertainment diminishes everyone. We are all traumatized.