“Smile 2” is in theaters, grinning from ear to ear.
The sequel to 2022 breakout hit “Smile,” once again written and directed by Parker Finn, sees the demonic curse passed to a global pop star named Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is dealing with the haunting while also attempting to prep a new worldwide tour. She had recently been institutionalized following an accident that led to the death of her boyfriend, played by Ray Nicholson. Is she actually being followed by an ancient supernatural evil? Or is she losing her sanity once again?
Well, that is the big question.
TheWrap spoke to Finn about the movie’s ending and where the world of “Smile” could go from here. Major spoiler warning. We aren’t kidding. We are getting into the nitty-gritty here.
What happens at the end of “Smile 2,” exactly?
Right before the big finale, Skye is hospitalized for exhaustion. She needs to get out of there, because she has been contacted by Morris (character actor stalwart Peter Jacobson), a nurse who has also been impacted by the demonic force. He thinks that there’s a way to stop it – by bringing the possessed person’s heart rate down until they are clinically dead, in a room where nobody else is around. That way, the demon has no way of passing to the next person.
Skye fights her way out of her hospital bed and, in the process, is possessed and winds up murdering her mother (Rosemarie DeWitt). She flees the hospital with the help of her bestie, Gemma (Dylan Gelula). Only, part of the way to Jersey, she discovers that Gemma is actually the demon. Don’t you hate when that happens?
She gets rid of Gemma and winds up in a freezer in Jersey (inside an old Pizza Hut, of course) with Morris, who leaves and – wouldn’t you know it – the demon makes itself known. We then see that none of what we thought had just happened has taken place – Skye is inside a chrysalis, part of her live stage show set. She looks out into the audience and sees her mother and her friends. Everyone is cheering her on.
That’s when, on stage, the smile demon that we saw at the end of the first “Smile” appears. It’s wearing Skye as a kind of suit, unzipping itself in front of Skye, quite literally, using the scar from the car accident as the “zipper.” We hear, just off frame, as Skye mutilates herself, the crowd of thousands watching in horror. That’s when we finally see her body drop into frame – her microphone shoved through her eye, into her brain.
Where did that ending come from?
According to Finn, he knew the ending of the movie even before he had worked out the rest of the story. Working through the idea of the smile curse haunting a pop star, led him to the idea of that ending. “I didn’t know how I was going to pull it off, but I had this idea of some final images. And I was like, Alright, that’s a journey that I just absolutely fucking love,” Finn said. “And for me, I love that the ending of this film echoes the ending of the first film, but they also are diametrically opposite.” As Finn explained, the first film ended in “this tiny, dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere by ourselves, in private,” where this new film is on “the main stage at essentially what should be Madison Square Garden and it’s in front of 20,000 screaming fans.”
Finn was also drawn to the “meta-commentary” of the moment – “the audience in that arena, staring through the screen at the audience in the movie theater.” He said that element should dredge up questions: “Wait, did we do this? Like, by us coming back and watching ‘Smile 2,’ have we done this to Skye? Are we somehow complicit?”
The filmmaker “loved that idea so much.” “When you think about celebrities and this idea of platform and the influence that they can have over their audience, it felt so just like electrifying to do that,” Finn explained.
Also, Finn said, it was an opportunity to do “a literal mic drop.”
What about the section before, in the Pizza Hut freezer?
The whole journey to the Pizza Hut freezer in New Jersey brings up other questions – chiefly, is hope (and the cruel obliteration of hope) part of the haunting?
“I hope it raises the question about whether that is part of people’s journey,” Finn said. “This idea of how it breaks you utterly and completely – does it need to take you to this place in your head that then it can really come in and just snuff out all hope and do that last fracturing of the character that prepares them for this final moment?”
Will this be explored in “Smile 3?”
It could be – what the ending of “Smile 2” really does is open the world. If the curse is passed by watching someone who is possessed kill themselves, then tens of thousands of people in that area watched Skye’s final moments (and how many more watched via live streams or social media?) It remains to be seen, since the only thing scarier than a horrible smiling demon is a domestic box office tally.
“Smile 2” is in theaters now.
