Smile 2

Parker Finn's 2024 sequel Smile 2 shifts the franchise's focus from a therapist's quiet unraveling to the high-stakes world of a pop star's comeback tour. Naomi Scott plays Skye Riley, a global singer whose carefully managed public image hides a history of addiction, chronic pain, and the guilt of surviving a car crash that killed her boyfriend. The Smile Entity, a curse that passes from witness to witness through suicide, finds its way to Skye after a drug deal goes violently wrong. What follows is a week-long spiral in which reality and hallucination blur, with the entity using Skye's fame, trauma, and the pressure of an upcoming Madison Square Garden show as weapons against her.

Produced for $28 million, the film earned over $138 million at the box office, making it one of the year's most profitable horror releases. Rosemarie DeWitt plays Elizabeth, Skye's controlling mother and manager; Lukas Gage appears as a troubled drug dealer; and Kyle Gallner returns briefly as Joel, the survivor from the first film. The score, composed by Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, mixes electronic textures with orchestral dread, while Scott performed original pop songs written for the movie. The R-rated runtime stretches to 127 minutes, allowing Finn to build tension through long, uncomfortable sequences that exploit the loneliness of celebrity.

Critical reception was broadly positive, with Scott's performance earning particular praise. The film holds an 85% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 67 on Metacritic, though some reviewers noted that the sequel's larger canvas sometimes dilutes the original's intimate horror. The ending, in which Skye's suicide is broadcast to thousands of fans and millions online, sets up a potential pandemic-level spread of the curse for future installments. Finn has confirmed that a third film is in development, with the entity's evolution toward mass infection a key narrative thread. [edit]

Six days after the events of the first film, Joel (Kyle Gallner) remains hunted by the Smile Entity. Desperate to break the curse, he tracks down a drug dealer and tries to pass the entity by killing him in front of a witness, but the plan goes wrong when the witness is shot. Joel flees and is struck by a car, his body dragged across the pavement. The entity passes to another dealer present: Lewis Fregoli (Lukas Gage).

One year later, pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is preparing for a comeback tour after a devastating accident that killed her boyfriend Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson) and left her with a spinal injury, chronic pain, and a pill addiction. Her mother and manager Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt) pushes her relentlessly, dismissing her physical and emotional struggles. To manage her back pain, Skye secretly contacts Lewis to buy Vicodin. When she arrives at his apartment, Lewis is clearly disturbed, ranting about something following him. An invisible force enters his mouth, his face stretches into a grotesque smile, and he smashes his own face with a weight plate until the skin hangs from his jaw. Skye witnesses the suicide in horror, nearly calling the police before realizing the scandal it would cause.

From that moment, Skye begins to see the smile everywhere: on strangers, on her assistant Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), on her own reflection. The entity torments her with hallucinations that exploit her deepest fears: the guilt over Paul's death, her mother's emotional abuse, the pressure of public scrutiny, and her own self-destructive tendencies. She reaches out to her estranged friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula) for support, but the entity twists every interaction into a potential trap. An ER nurse named Morris (Peter Jacobson) approaches Skye with a theory: the entity can be defeated if the infected person's heart is stopped and then restarted. He offers to perform the procedure at an abandoned Pizza Hut, away from crowds.

As the tour date approaches, Skye's grip on reality weakens. The entity appears as everyone around her, wearing that same sinister smile. She pushes through rehearsals, performances, and media obligations while trying to discern what is real. The film builds toward her massive comeback show at Madison Square Garden, where thousands of fans await. The central question becomes whether Skye can survive the entity's week-long torment cycle and find a way to break the curse before her final performance.[edit]