Portraying the life of a diva pop star — or, at least, doing it convincingly — isn’t the easiest thing for a movie to bring off. There are too many real-life counterparts. The director Brady Corbet (“The Brutalist”), teaming up with Natalie Portman, got about halfway there in “Vox Lux.” Lady Gaga, drawing on elements of her own legend but shrewd enough to play the heroine of “A Star Is Born” as not a version of herself, created a character for the ages. More recently, M. Night Shyamalan seemed to make “Trap” mostly to let his budding musician daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, embody a pop singer — which she did with aplomb in concert, less convincingly in the backstage scenes. So when you hear that “Smile 2,” Parker Finn’s sequel to his effective if overloaded creep-out horror film of two years ago, is centered around a pop star, you may not exactly be expecting a deep-dish immersion in the pop-music universe.
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The first “Smile,” after all, was a movie in which people were possessed by a weird demon, which caused them to have a breakdown over the course of a week, at which point they would flash an insidious nightmare smile at someone else and proceed to commit suicide directly in front of them, at which point the demon passed into the body of the one who witnessed the suicide. Complicated! Or maybe just convoluted. The premise of “Smile” all made sense, with the host-hopping demon a descendent of the ones from “It Follows” and (going back to the ’80s) “The Hidden.” Yet the movie, vividly staged as it was, often just seemed a glorified vehicle for all those self-mutilating deaths and frozen rictus grins.
“Smile 2” is different. It’s got all that stuff, but it’s a horror film that strives to create a genuine emotional center. And that’s because it really, truly is about a pop star — a dance-queen idol named Skye Riley (played with yes-she-really-could-be-one authenticity by the British actor and singer Naomi Scott), who from the start is fending off demons that are all too human. A year before, high on drugs, Skye was seriously injured in a car crash that killed her movie-star boyfriend . Since then, she’s been in recovery (in every sense), and she’s about to launch a comeback tour. We see her reintroduce herself to her audience with an appearance on “Drew” (with Drew Barrymore playing herself), where she shows off her new Edie Sedgwick hairdo along with her practiced air of chastised arrogance.
The film sticks close to Skye’s point-of-view and takes us through her life — the rehearsals and costume changes, the compulsive guzzling of designer bottles of Voss water, her bickering relationship with her doting but parasitic manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), her increasingly severe case of the hair-tearing impulse trichotillomania, and her parade of fans lining up for their turn to pose with her in “badass” selfies. Almost every scene of “Smile 2” is infused with the awareness that to be a pop star in the 21st century is to conduct oneself like an industry: a neverending exercise in corporate image management.
At times, when you look at someone like Ariana Grande or Olivia Rodrigo, it’s not hard to see the vulnerable human behind the cultivated star façade. Naomi Scott, in “Smile 2,” shows you both. Since Skye is grappling with a demon that has invaded her, plus the memories of that nightmare car accident, not to mention all the destruction her selfishness has caused (this demon likes to have some built-in mental torment to work with), her life and career begin to come apart. But to everyone around her, who can’t see the demon, it just looks like she’s cracking up. And in a way, maybe she is. “Smile 2” is a flash-cut horror parable, but the story it’s telling is that pop fame makes you crazy. The movie is hardly subtle, yet Parker Finn has become a clever enough filmmaker to make reality feel like a hallucination and hallucinations feel like reality.
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The Smile, as before, can come from almost anywhere (like the tween girl in braces in the fan queue), but it often comes from someone who is close to Skye. And that can be as disquieting as a jump scare. The horror kicks off when she goes to visit Lewis (Lukas Gage), an old high-school chum who’s now a high-end drug dealer. Flying on cocaine, he’s become a jabbering head case who proceeds to kill himself by bashing his face with a circular 35-pound workout weight. All very garish, but then Skye gets in touch with Gemma (Dylan Gelula), the unpretentious bestie she blew off when she was at the height of her drug frenzy. Their reunion, in Skye’s apartment, draws us in, and so we’re hardly expecting Gemma to flash The Smile. One of the film’s shuddery highlights is when Skye gets visited by her backup dancers in a sequence that would make Bob Fosse smile from his grave.
Asked to be a presenter at a children’s benefit, Skye has to read a canned speech off a Teleprompter, which turns into a literal bad dream, which prompts her to go over the edge. The scene climaxes with her late boyfriend walking up to the stage flashing The Smile (that Ray Nicholson is the actor son of Jack Nicholson makes him genetically predisposed to do this well). When she lashes out at this mirage by shoving the very wrong person offstage, it’s a moment of the purest funny-cringe.
The best thing about “Smile 2” is that it keeps the audience off balance, starting with how Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s unsettling electronic score works on us. Skye’s story is riddled with trap doors that keep opening into her repressed reality, and Naomi Scott plays this with great skill. She’s not just a horror-movie whipping girl — we develop a sympathetic understanding of Skye and her predicament, which is that she’s surrounded by handlers but feels more and more alone. By the time she goes to a bar to meet Morris (Peter Jacobson), who has a plan to defeat the demon — she just has to agree to let her heart be stopped for two minutes! — a sudden onslaught of fans who want to bond with her on TikTok seems as much of a nightmare as anything in the movie.
Yet by the time Skye finds herself in the freezer of an abandoned Pizza Hut to follow through on Morris’s plan, the film has become too fractious and extended for its own good. The ending is destined to leave the audience scratching its collective head, and that’s because Parker Finn, now in love with the “Smile” mythology he created, gets grandiose about it. The film climaxes with a body-horror maximalism coupled with a minimum of logic. Until then, though, it wrings honest jolts out of the unnerving hothouse of unreality that is pop stardom.
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