Warning: This article contains spoilers for Smile 2.
Just when you thought fortune, fame, and a sold-out comeback tour could save pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) from suffering a grim fate at the hands… er… multiple jaws of the Smile Entity, think again.
Alas, writer-director Parker Finn’s second Smile movie claimed the life of yet another lead character in the budding film series. Much like Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) in the 2022 original, Skye doesn’t survive her horrific journey through Smile 2. But, instead of passing on the inherited Smile curse to another person like Rose did, Skye’s gruesome death plays out on stage in front of thousands of people inside Madison Square Garden — all of whom gathered to film her comeback performance with their phones, broadcasting their idol’s death for untold millions more to watch online.
“For Skye, what I was chasing was this catharsis of her journey that ends so horribly, but it ends, for me, exactly where it should,” Finn explains to Entertainment Weekly. “It felt like the most horrifying thing I could possibly do was have her on stage, finally taken over by the Smile in front of 20,000 screaming fans. There’s a question of, is it being live-streamed? How big could it go? It felt intoxicating to me. I loved this feeling and power of the Smile, and this idea of the commentary on celebrity platform and influence on the public. She’s potentially passing this on, and the idea of, because of her platform and celebrity, how many people that can reach.”
Paramount Pictures
The way Finn gets us to that point, though, is important to building the series’ growing lore. Smile introduced us to the sinister entity that inhabits its victims, triggering a week-long cycle of mental and physical torture that ends in suicide. Whoever witnesses the host’s grisly death then becomes the Smile’s next victim. In the first movie, Rose traces the pattern back to several previous victims and attempts to stop it after discovering that a convicted murderer lifted the curse by killing someone. In Smile 2an ER nurse, Morris (Peter Jacobson), tells Skye that he believes the entity can be vanquished if the infected person’s heart stops for a short time before resuscitation.
At the end of the film, after exhausting all other options, Skye finally agrees to meet with Morris, who takes her to an abandoned Pizza Hut, planning to stop her heart and then bring her back to life. As she waits for Morris to begin the procedure, the entity shows up and reveals that all is not as it seems. The lights go out, and when they come back, Sky realizes she’s not in a Pizza Hut at all — she’s onstage at Madison Square Garden in front of thousands of screaming fans. And that’s where the entity reveals its final form, shedding its human shell to expose a towering, multi-faced, grinning monstrosity. Skye, the only person in the arena who can see the creature, sinks to her knees in existential terror before grabbing her bejeweled microphone and bashing her brains in — much to the horror of her stunned fans.
Paramount Pictures
Finn tells EW he was inspired by the stories of tragic pop stars like Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, aiming to point the finger at the audience for playing a part in their highly publicized unravelings.
“It was an exploration of the downfall of this pop star who’s unable to overcome the things that have been put upon her. What I love about the ending of this film is that I wanted to create this meta-feeling moment, where the audience in the arena is staring through the screen at the audience in the movie theater,” he says of Skye’s final moments, which largely play out as his camera fixes on the audience’s horrified faces. “I wanted to raise the question: Did we do this to Skye? By us coming back for a Smile 2have we done this to her? It’s all intriguing to me, this idea of ‘are we complicit in this?'”
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If thousands — or perhaps even millions— end up inheriting the curse from Skye, what does that mean for a third film?
“We’ll have to see how audiences react to Smile 2. I think that, in the way that we jump rails from Smile to Smile 2if there were more Smile stories to tell in the future, I’d want to make sure we’re doing something that feels like, holy s—, I can’t believe this is where Smile is going,” Finn teases of a potential Smile 3. “The Smile films are so character-driven; it’s the reason I wanted to tell these intimate, human melodramas. I’d want to make sure that would be infused in any future Smile stories as well. There are a lot of interesting directions on where it could go. I’m staying mum on what could or could not happen, but I think it’d be really exciting.”
Smile 2 is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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