Smile vs Smile 2: The Curse Got Bigger. Did the Franchise Get Better?

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses major plot developments and the endings of both Smile and Smile 2.

There is an obvious way to make a horror sequel bigger. Add more deaths, increase the budget, expand the mythology and give the monster a larger playground. Smile 2 does all of those things. It takes a curse that followed therapist Rose Cotter through hospitals, suburban homes and increasingly lonely rooms, and hands it to Skye Riley, a global pop star preparing for a comeback tour with an audience large enough to turn one person's nightmare into an arena event.

But scale is not what makes Smile 2 more interesting than its predecessor. The real evolution is what the sequel does with the first film's central metaphor. Smile turns trauma into something that can follow you. Smile 2 places that trauma inside celebrity culture, where suffering can be photographed, managed, marketed, speculated about and still expected to hit its marks under stage lighting. The Entity is frightening, but so is the world it finds Skye living in before it ever arrives.

That shift also changes our role as viewers. Rose spends much of Smile trying to convince everyone around her that what she is experiencing is real. With Skye, the film eventually removes our ability to know what is real at all. We watch her unravel, we scrutinise her behaviour and we wait for the next spectacle because that is what the film has trained us to do. Somewhere between psychological horror and pop-star melodrama, Smile 2 starts asking an uglier question: when somebody is visibly falling apart in front of us, how good are we actually at distinguishing concern from consumption?

Smile Turns Trauma Into Something You Can Catch

The first Smile is not particularly subtle about trauma. Rose witnesses a patient die by suicide in front of her, becomes the next target of the Entity and discovers that the curse has been moving through a chain of people connected by witnessing horrific deaths. Trauma is not simply emotional damage in this universe. It behaves almost like an infection.

Smile turns trauma inward, trapping Rose inside an experience the people around her cannot see.

That could have been painfully simplistic, especially because “hurt people hurt people” is hardly a revolutionary observation. What makes the first film more interesting is Rose herself. She is a therapist, somebody whose professional identity depends on recognising distress in other people, yet she has spent years keeping her own childhood trauma at enough of a distance to function. Her mother's death has not disappeared because Rose learned the vocabulary to describe trauma. She has simply become very good at living around it.

The Entity exploits that gap. It does not create Rose's guilt or grief. It identifies what she has never resolved and uses it against her. That is where the film's supernatural mechanics work best for me. Trauma is not frightening because the movie suggests it makes somebody contaminated. It is frightening because unresolved pain can change how somebody experiences the world while everybody around them continues responding only to what they can see.

Rose becomes erratic, frightened and increasingly difficult for the people in her life to understand. From her perspective, she is fighting for survival. From theirs, she looks unstable. The distance between those two realities is where Smile is much more uncomfortable than its smiling monster.

The Smile Is a Mask Before It Is a Monster

The most obvious symbol in the franchise is also probably its smartest. A smile is meant to reassure us. We associate it with warmth, friendliness and the basic social message that everything is fine. Parker Finn has described being interested in the way people use smiles as a mask, presenting one thing to the world while hiding something very different underneath.

That makes the Entity's expression more than a creepy visual. The smile is disturbing because the eyes do not agree with it. The human face is giving us two pieces of information at once, and our instinct recognises that something is wrong before the film needs to explain why.

The expression is familiar. The emotion behind it is not.

It also fits neatly with the way both protagonists cope. Rose has built a respectable adult life around pain she has never fully confronted. Skye's version is more extreme because smiling when she does not feel like smiling is effectively part of her job.

That difference matters. Rose has to convince people she is not losing her mind. Skye has to convince people she is fine and then go onstage.

The sequel understands that there is something inherently unnerving about a person being required to perform normality while their internal reality is collapsing. The Entity takes that familiar social behaviour and turns it grotesque, but it did not invent the mask. We did.

Skye Riley Was Performing Before the Entity Arrived

Skye does not enter Smile 2 as a psychologically blank protagonist waiting for a horror film to happen to her. She is already carrying grief, guilt and addiction after the car crash that killed her boyfriend, Paul. She is also trying to rebuild a career large enough that her recovery is no longer entirely private. It has tour dates, choreography, interviews, costumes, staff and money attached to it.

That makes her a particularly cruel choice of victim. If Rose's trauma isolates her gradually, Skye begins the film surrounded by people while already having almost nowhere to fall apart.

Her mother is also her manager. Her body has to be physically capable of performing. Her recovery has become part of the narrative surrounding her comeback. There are employees whose jobs depend on Skye Riley being ready to become Skye Riley again. The distinction between concern for her as a person and concern about the tour is never entirely comfortable.

Parker Finn has said that in creating Skye he looked at the world of female pop stars, celebrity consumption and the pressures attached to that kind of public life. The film's premise itself is built around a star who is preparing for a world tour while facing both the consequences of her past and the pressure of fame. DGA

That is why I think the sequel's trauma metaphor works better when it stays tied to celebrity rather than simply becoming “Rose, but famous”. Skye's problem is not only that people do not believe what she sees. It is that even when the people around her can clearly see that something is wrong, stopping is almost impossible. There is always another rehearsal, another appearance, another room full of people waiting for the version of her they were promised.

The Entity finds a woman who is already being asked to override what she feels.

It hardly needs to invent a new system.

Everyone Is Watching Skye. Nobody Is Seeing Her

The cinematography makes that contradiction difficult to miss. Smile often creates fear through negative space. Rose occupies a frame while our eyes drift towards the doorway behind her, the empty corner beside her or the person standing slightly too still in the distance. We learn to search the frame because the threat might already be there.

Skye's world is different. She is rarely invisible. Cameras, dancers, fans, assistants and enormous stage lights surround her. Even when she is alone, she exists in spaces built for somebody whose life is constantly observed.

Skye can be visible to thousands of people and still be completely alone inside what is happening to her.

The sequel plays with that visibility. Skye is photographed from above, swallowed by huge rooms and placed beneath lighting designed to make her impossible to ignore. The camera also becomes increasingly unstable. Spaces invert. Perspectives shift. The world can appear physically wrong before Skye has any way of proving that it is.

What I like is that the film does not simply use those angles because upside-down New York looks cool in a trailer. The visual instability gradually teaches us that the image itself cannot be trusted. In the first film, I often understand that Rose is seeing something nobody else can. In Smile 2, that distinction eventually becomes much harder to make because the camera stops giving the audience a safe position outside Skye's perception.

We are not watching an unreliable protagonist from an objective distance. The film makes our access to the story unreliable.

That becomes particularly effective during the performance sequences. Skye can be standing beneath enough light for thousands of people to see every movement she makes, yet nobody can see what is happening inside her. Visibility and understanding become almost complete opposites.

For somebody whose career depends on being seen, that is a horrible place to be.

When Does Concern Become Spectacle?

This is also where Smile 2 brushes up against something much less supernatural.

We have a long history of watching famous women suffer in public and treating that suffering as part of the entertainment surrounding them. Britney Spears is an obvious example, but she should not be the only one we reach for. The point is not that Skye Riley is secretly based on Britney, or that every female pop star who has struggled publicly has lived some version of Smile 2. The comparison is about the audience.

The treatment of Spears in the 2000s is uncomfortable to revisit precisely because so much of it happened in plain sight. Paparazzi photographs and footage documented increasingly distressed moments while tabloids and entertainment media continued turning those moments into content. Later examinations of that period have forced a broader reconsideration of how readily a person's crisis became a public spectacle, although Spears herself has also criticised documentaries that revisit her suffering while claiming to condemn the media that exploited it in the first place.

That last point matters. Even concern can become another form of consumption.

Ariana Grande offers a very different example. After the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, she spoke publicly about experiencing symptoms of PTSD and the difficulty of discussing her own trauma when so many victims and families had suffered devastating loss. Yet she was still Ariana Grande, a working performer whose grief existed alongside an enormous public career.

Then there is Chappell Roan, whose rapid rise to fame prompted a very contemporary argument about what audiences believe they are entitled to from somebody once that person becomes famous. Roan has spoken openly about stalking, harassment, invasive fan behaviour and the distinction between being at work as a performer and being a private person when she is not. Her attempts to draw those boundaries have themselves become public debate, which rather neatly proves the problem.

These women are not interchangeable, and their experiences should not be flattened into evidence for a horror film. What connects them is the expectation that fame somehow changes the rules around privacy, pain and access.

We say celebrities are human beings and then become irritated when their humanity interferes with the product.

That is the mirror Smile 2 holds up more effectively than I expected.

The Film Makes Us Part of the Audience Around Skye

There is an uncomfortable irony in spending two hours watching a film about a woman whose suffering is constantly being consumed.

We want Skye to survive, obviously. We also bought a ticket to watch her deteriorate.

We wait for the next person to smile. We watch her paranoia worsen. We enjoy the set pieces built around her inability to distinguish reality from hallucination. Naomi Scott's performance works because Skye looks increasingly exhausted, frightened and stripped of control, and that performance is also the thing we are there to see.

That does not mean watching horror is secretly immoral, and I think the argument becomes silly if pushed that far. Horror depends on our willingness to experience somebody else's fear from a position of safety. Smile 2 is interesting because its specific protagonist makes that arrangement unusually visible.

The people around Skye repeatedly assess whether she can continue. We do something similar. How bad is she now? Can she still perform? Is she hallucinating? Is she using again? Will she make it to the concert?

Eventually a much simpler question starts hanging over all of it: why is anybody still expecting this woman to work?

The movie knows what we are waiting for.

It knows Skye's collapse is the show.

At What Point Did the Film Start Lying to Us?

The sequel becomes most interesting when it stops allowing us to assume we know more than Skye does.

By the final act, Smile 2 has removed the audience’s ability to separate Skye’s perception from objective reality.

Gemma is the clearest example. Once Skye receives a call from the real Gemma while the person we believed was Gemma is sitting beside her, the film forces us to reconsider not only that scene but everything leading up to it. If that relationship was being manipulated, what else have we accepted simply because the camera showed it to us?

Then the final act removes even more certainty. Skye's mother is alive. The apparent escape did not occur as we experienced it. Her attempt to reach Morris becomes questionable. By the time Skye finds herself onstage, huge sections of the reality we watched have collapsed.

I originally thought the most interesting question was the point at which Skye ceased to be herself and the Entity took over. I do not think that is quite right anymore. It implies a clean transfer of control that the film never really gives us.

The better question is: when did the reality we were watching stop corresponding to the world around her?

The film refuses to give us a timestamp, and I am glad it does. We are left mentally rewinding scenes, checking conversations against one another and deciding for ourselves where the Entity's deception became almost total. In a media landscape that often seems terrified of allowing an audience to leave with unresolved questions, that confidence is refreshing.

The ambiguity also works because it is not arbitrary. Smile 2 has spent the entire film destabilising our relationship with the image. Inverted shots, subjective camera work and hallucinations have already taught us that seeing something is not the same as knowing it happened.

By the ending, the Entity has not simply convinced Skye of a false reality.

The film has convinced us too.

There is a limit to how far that trick can go, though. If every contradiction can eventually be explained with “the Entity made her see it”, uncertainty becomes a convenient escape hatch. There is a difference between making the audience question a scene and making the scene meaningless because anything can be withdrawn later.

Smile 2 gets close to that line without crossing it for me. A third film should be careful not to rely on the same device more heavily. Once an audience assumes that nothing on screen needs to be real, paranoia can very quickly become indifference.

The Final Concert Turns the Mirror Around

The concert ending brings every part of Skye's story together in one extremely nasty image.

She spends the film being watched. Then she dies in front of the largest audience possible.

Her private terror becomes the ultimate public event.

The curse begins with individual witnesses. Smile 2 ends by giving it an arena.

Thousands of people are looking directly at her. Phones are out. The stage lights are on. She is exactly where Skye Riley is supposed to be, and it is the worst possible place she could be.

On the level of franchise mechanics, the implication is enormous. The curse has previously moved through intimate acts of witnessed trauma. Now the Entity has potentially given itself thousands of witnesses at once.

But I think the ending works even before we start calculating infection numbers. It turns the film's celebrity argument back onto the audience. We have spent the entire sequel watching a woman disintegrate. The concert audience becomes an exaggerated reflection of us, another crowd witnessing Skye's suffering because the spectacle has placed her in front of them.

The difference is that they do not know what kind of show they have bought tickets to.

Neither did she.

Where Smile Should Go Next

This is where the franchise could very easily learn the wrong lesson from Smile 2.

The obvious third film is an outbreak movie. Thousands of concertgoers are infected, the Entity spreads everywhere, society begins collapsing and somebody eventually stands in front of a whiteboard explaining how Smile transmission works.

I hope they do almost none of that.

A Smile apocalypse would certainly be bigger, but the franchise is at its best when the horror is intimate. The Entity gets inside somebody's perception, turns familiar people into threats and gradually removes the victim's ability to trust their own senses. Making the monster more widespread does not automatically make that experience more frightening.

What I would rather see is the concert creating mass uncertainty.

Thousands of people witnessed Skye's death. Footage would spread instantly. Fans would analyse it. Rumours about previous victims could surface. Some witnesses might become convinced they are cursed whether they are or not. People would start watching one another for signs. Someone smiling at the wrong moment could become enough to trigger panic.

And because this is the internet, somebody would inevitably imitate the smile for attention.

That opens up something much more interesting than a supernatural pandemic. If people know the curse might exist, how do they distinguish possession from paranoia? What happens when ordinary behaviour becomes evidence? What happens when somebody falsely accuses another person of being infected? What happens when videos of the smile become memes and the visual language of the Entity is copied so widely that nobody can tell which image should actually frighten them?

The first Smile makes Rose doubt the people around her. Smile 2 makes Skye, and eventually us, doubt perception itself. A third film could make an entire group of people doubt one another.

That feels like the natural escalation to me. Not more lore, but more paranoia. Not a bigger monster, but a world in which the possibility of the monster changes how everybody behaves.

So, Did the Franchise Actually Get Better?

I think Smile 2 is the more ambitious film, even if Smile remains the tighter one. The sequel understands that trauma becomes more complicated when it is experienced in public, and that somebody can be seen by millions while remaining profoundly unseen. It also finds a way to make its unreliable protagonist infect the form of the film itself, until the audience is no longer standing safely outside her confusion.

That is where I want Smile to keep looking.

Because the most frightening thing about the franchise was never really the grin.

It is the possibility that somebody can be telling us something is terribly wrong while we are still looking at the smile.