Abhiroop Das
With Parker Finn at the helm, ‘Smile 2‘ takes the premise of ‘Smile‘ and stretches it in multiple dimensions, creating a tale that is both larger than life and painstakingly human. This time, pop star Skye Riley becomes our eyes and ears into this world, only to have her senses hijacked by the effects of the Smile curse. Having just started a very public comeback journey after an unstable career, she is determined to make her story a success, but fate is seemingly not on her side. The rules are still the same: the Smile Entity takes roughly six weeks to take over its target, who then takes their own life in front of a new person.
However, to avoid this fate, Skye decides to go to extreme lengths, even attempting to cheat death in the process. In doing all this, the film aligns perfectly with the modern meta of horror storytelling, one that is often dubbed “metaphorror” due to its symbolic nature. As Skye battles substance addiction and navigates the complex world of showbiz, the story weaves in themes of trauma and recovery, amping up the film’s realism.
Smile 2 is a Fresh Take on the Cursed Chain Subgenre of Horror
‘Smile 2’ is a fictional story created by Parker Finn as a sequel to ‘Smile,’ and going further back, as a spiritual sibling to his short film, ‘Laura Hasn’t Slept.’ While there is an overlap in style and ideas between the short and the movies, Finn has confirmed that ‘Smile 2’ isn’t directly connected to ‘Laura Hasn’t Slept.’ Rather, the ‘Smile’ movies are designed to tell their own horror narratives, taking inspiration from the stories that Finn admires most. In a conversation with Syfy, he described his work as “a love letter to the cursed chain story,” referring to the genre of supernatural horror where a phenomenon passes from one person to another. It is no surprise that Finn has named the iconic ‘Ringu’ by Hideo Nakata as one of his inspirations, alongside Gore Verbinski’s American remake, ‘The Ring.’
At first glance, the premises of the ‘Ring’ and ‘Smile’ series do feel remarkably complementary, in that both feature a curse that takes a person’s life within a certain period of time, unless they pass the curse on to someone else. In the case of ‘Smile 2,’ that element is even more important than in the first film, and it tracks with his other inspirations. In terms of style and atmosphere, Finn drew from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror classic ‘Cure,’ praising its way of making everything seem caught between a dream and a nightmare. The thing common between these stories is that they build up the central mystery as if it were a viral urban legend, and that is precisely what Finn aimed for. While the supernatural aspects of ‘Smile 2’ may have been invented from scratch, there are some parallels to reality in terms of its character work.
Smile 2 is Loosely Informed by the Public Struggles of Real-Life Pop Icons
In an interview with Movieweb, Parker Finn pointed out that ‘Smile 2’ draws parallels to Hollywood and the pop music industry, as well as the pressure that surrounds artists. “Certainly, Amy Winehouse was on my mind. Britney Spears, of course,” he said, adding, “Certainly those tragic stories, I was watching everything I could: documentaries, interviews, essays, articles, even Whitney Houston; there were a lot of women I was looking at who got destroyed by this process.” While none of these real-life stories serves as the direct basis for Skye’s journey, researching them had a strong impact on Finn’s creative process and also informed the themes he highlights in the film.
Finn’s conceptualization of Skye also has a metafictional element attached to it, as he described it as a desire to blur the lines between reality and fiction. This connects to the very existence of the film, as Finn questioned, “this idea that, are we somehow complicit in what’s happened here by coming back for a ‘Smile 2?’ Have we done this to Skye?” In a way, the story serves as a reflection of real life, particularly by showing a darker side of fandom culture and the parasocial relationships between fans and pop artists. Apart from these broader overlaps, however, ‘Smile 2’ remains a work of fiction, especially in the context of its supernatural elements, which aren’t based on any particular myth or urban legend.
Read More: Smile 2 Ending Explained: Does Skye Die? Is Everyone Cursed Now?
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