"Smile 2": The Trauma of Fame

Nov 15, 2024

This past week I was able to see Smile 2 in the movie theater. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can read my spoiler-free Letterboxd review here, because this review’s going into spoiler territory, including the movie’s theme of trauma of fame. The main takeaway is that it’s better than Smile and you should see it.

Spoilers for: Smile 2 (duh), Smile, and Truth or Dare

The original Smile movie is often cited as one of the scariest movies of the decade. I have to admit that I didn’t find it that scary1, nor did I find the premise that original. It really is a mash-up of The Ring, It Follows, and Truth or Dare. Don’t get me wrong: it was a good movie. Well-edited with masterful jump scares.

I do remember being intrigued by the thematic conceit of Smile: trauma as something contagious, something passed from person to person. See someone violently die, by suicide, no less, and you’re likely to suffer some lasting effects. Smile dealt with the most obvious version of shared trauma: familial trauma.

I listened to an episode of Horror Queers where the hosts compared Smile to the much less well-received Lights Out, where a mother haunted by a strange demon ultimately commits suicide in order to not pass the demon off to the rest of her family. The ending of Lights Out seems to imply that it’s better for people dealing with mental illness to die rather than make their loved ones deal with their trauma.

Smile has a similar ending, where Rose, the protagonist, is tricked into killing herself by the smile demon. Unlike in Lights Out, Rose is being manipulated by the demon, while in Lights Out, the mother kills herself purposefully in order to protect her family. In Smile, the curse is passed on to her ex boyfriend–an analog of the trauma of losing a loved one to mental illness. It’s hard to say that he’s better off in that scenario.

Smile 2: The Trauma of Fame

Smile 2 continues on the theme of trauma, but instead of generational trauma, it focuses on the trauma of fame. Skye Riley is an internationally famous pop singer, in the midst of a comeback one year after a grisly car accident where she was horribly injured. Her boyfriend, also a famous celebrity, was killed in the accident. We learn through flashbacks that they were high on cocaine and fighting, and the accident was caused when Skye jerked the steering wheel in a fit of rage.

Skye is a recovering drug addict. It’s important to note that this movie is not about drug addiction though. Despite how often Naomi Watts aggressively chugs bottles of Voss water to quell the urge to use (in a way that, honestly, seems a little dangerous. I’d be afraid of drowning. Girl, how often did you have to pee on set??), she doesn’t seem to have much trouble staying clean. Sure, she first encounters the demon while visiting her drug dealer, but she’s there pretty much on the up and up to buy Vicodin to deal with the residual pain for her injuries, which literally no one will prescribe to her.

This leads me to what this movie is really about: the trauma of fame. I understand why no one would prescribe painkillers to a known addict, but come on. The girl is one year out from a back injury and you’re expecting her to go on tour and perform acrobatic feats with no pain management? Like, she’s literally being passed from backup dancer to backup dancer upside down at one point.

Absolutely no one is taking care of this girl, except to treat her as an asset, a moneymaker. Every person she interacts with wants something from her–even her own mother. She is completely isolated in a sea of people, even though those people are all there because of her in some way. This sort of exploitation is especially insidious, because from the outside, Skye looks like she has it all–fame, money, success. But what good is all that when it comes at the cost of your relationships?

She never really knows if someone is truly there for her, or if they simply want to be around her for the benefits of her stardom. This theme is underscored by Skye’s relationship with Gemma, who she describes as her “ride or die.” This is the one relationship that Skye believes she can count on.

Or at least that she hopes she can. Because we see little hints that maybe the relationship isn’t as secure as Skye would like. In fact, they haven’t spoken in over a year when the movie starts. We learn the reason for this is that Skye called Gemma an “opportunistic bitch,” which implies that she was afraid Gemma was using her just like everyone else. Whether this is true or not is never clear; but the fear is enough for the demon. “You’re a horrible friend,” it whispers to Skye in Gemma’s voice.

And that leads us to the final trauma of fame: that it lets the worst parts of Skye’s personality run rampant. The movie leads us to believe that Skye really isn’t a good friend, or even a good person. She throws fits, screams at her backup dancers, and is dismissive of her assistant. When she calls Gemma, the call is all about her–how she’s struggling, how she needs Gemma to stop her from freaking out. She immediately demands that Gemma accompany her on tour with little thought to how this would uproot Gemma’s life, and she becomes jealous when Gemma refuses to cancel plans to soothe her. Pretty bold when you’ve just made up with someone.

And this is the thing that really eats at Skye. She knows she’s a bad person. “I ruin everything I touch,” she repeats several times. There’s always the doubt within her that maybe the reason she’s so isolated is that she is a terrible person. Maybe if she were better, the people in her life would care more.

Addiction, isolation, the freedom to become the worst version of oneself–all results of the trauma of fame.

Hallucinations in fiction–cop out or tool?

I generally don’t like movies that heavily utilize hallucinations. Too often it’s done in such a way that, once the hallucination is revealed, it completely nullifies the consequences and stakes of what took place in the hallucination, which the audience has spent time getting invested in. It saps the goodwill of the audience. The story loses credibility.

It’s a popular trick amongst filmmakers because it lets them show visuals they might not otherwise be able to due to story limitations. Not to mention it can pad runtime.

I think Smile 2 mostly escapes these issues, because what happens is literally the story. Hallucinations are how the smile demon tortures their host in order to extract as much suffering from them as possible. It does reveal a flaw of the movie: There are no stakes. There is no way to beat the smile demon, because it has complete control from the moment it attaches itself to you. Any time the host tries to outsmart it, it makes them hallucinate in a way that prevents them from succeeding.

In an action or drama movie, this would be the hook. The audience wants to know how the protagonist escapes an impossible situation. Luckily, in the horror genre, they don’t actually have to escape. The suffering is enough.

I think it is bit of a cop out that we don’t see how Skye gets to that moment where she kills herself on stage. We learn that she hasn’t killed her mother and her reputation is intact. But since we are so tied to Skye’s POV, I think it’s mostly forgivable.

A final thought on the ending

The premise of this ending falls flat when you think about it. The film seems to be trying to do the same thing that they did in the ending Truth or Dare–virally infect the world by passing the curse on to a huge amount of people at once.

(This is super bold, considering how similar the smile effect that victims see before they die is so similar in both movies. But I digress.)

The smile demon even tells Skye that it’s been waiting for her–and I think it’s implied that it’s been waiting for someone who’s famous, someone who can help it really spread to a large audience. And isn’t this exactly how we expected this movie to end the moment we first saw the trailer? I know it was for me.

But it doesn’t need Skye to do that, does it? If it can infect a whole stadium of people at once, then there’s no reason it couldn’t have spread to multiple people at once before this. Hasn’t this demon ever seen Pay it Forward? We all know that if one person does five kind things, then asks the recipients of those acts to do the same, it will eventually Change The World!

Come on, smile demon–you could have achieved complete societal collapse by now!

It’s nitpicky, but it really does take the BOOM out of this ending.

All hail Naomi Watts

One BIG reason this movie succeeds is Naomi Watt’s performance. She kills. See aforementioned violent water chugging and being passed around by backup dancers while holding her body in the shape of a barrel monkey. She’s so good.

See also Ray Nicholson, who isn’t in this for long, but definitely serves the creepy Jack Torrance smile he inherited from his father.

Actually, everyone in this is great. That scene where the backup dancers emerge from her closet is 🔥.

What I’m Reading

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

It’s been a while since I’ve read and advance copy of a book. I’m just trying to keep up with my Libby holds these days. But when the publisher offered me this and I saw that title, that cover, and who it was written by, how could I refuse? Chuck Wendig wrote The Book of Accidents, and all I can say is this guy could write any crummy premise into an absolute gem of a story.

Another writer I’d like to be when I grow up.

So what did you think of Smile 2? What are YOU reading? Comment and let me know! I’d love to hear from you.