The first Smile was a mildly effective series of exhaustive jump scares that ultimately overstayed its welcome with a deflating, sequel-bait ending. However, its excellent trailer and brilliant viral marketing campaign, featuring creepily smiling actors placed at sports games, propelled Smile to become the highest-grossing horror film of 2022, raking in over $200 million on a modest $17 million budget. Naturally, Paramount took the bait and greenlit writer-director Parker Finn’s Smile 2, a sequel that largely delivers more of the same—a rhythmic series of jolts you can almost set your watch by, along with enough therapy-speak to make you cancel your BetterHelp subscription as the credits roll.

The film starts with a bang (or, technically, a crash), as cinematographer Charlie Sarroff flexes his camera skills with an extended tracking shot in a cold open that follows scream king Kyle Gallner—reprising his role as Joel from the first film—into a drug dealer’s den. Joel witnessed his friend Rose set herself on fire at the end of Smile, so the cosmic parasite that tormented Rose throughout the first movie has now passed to him. The rules of this parasite are simple, even if their execution on-screen can be a bit inconsistent: the parasite feeds on the negative thoughts of its host, appearing as the host’s friends and family to psychologically terrorize them until their mind snaps, leading to a suicide in front of a witness, who then becomes the new host.

To escape this macabre daisy chain, a host can kill another person in the presence of a witness, causing the parasite to jump to the traumatized bystander—precisely what Gallner’s character attempts to do. Since Gallner isn’t a prominent figure in any of Smile 2’s marketing, it’s easy to guess he succeeded; Finn isn’t interested in tying this cash-cow franchise down to a single actor, after all. This time around, the criminally underutilized Naomi Scott takes the lead as Skye Riley, a famous popstar.

Skye is gearing up for her big comeback tour after a downward spiral of drug addiction landed her in a car crash that killed her actor boyfriend, Paul Hudson—played by Ray Nicholson, son of Jack Nicholson. After casting Sosie Bacon (Kevin Bacon’s daughter) in the lead of the first Smile, Finn clearly has a soft spot for keeping Hollywood’s nepo-babies in work. Skye’s accident left her with a gnarly abdominal scar and chronic back pain, which she can only manage with Tylenol since no doctor will prescribe anything stronger, for obvious reasons. As the pressures of the last week of tour preparation mount, exacerbated by her mom-ager Elizabeth (a role that expertly utilizes Rosemarie DeWitt’s talents), Skye embarks on a late-night Vicodin run that threatens to ruin the tour.

When Skye arrives at the apartment of her drug dealer, Lewis (played by Euphoria star Lukas Gage), she’s immediately met with a katana at her throat. As you’ve probably guessed, Lewis was in the drug den that Joel entered at the beginning of the film, likely to re-up with his suppliers but ended up getting much more than he bargained for. Despite Lewis’ paranoid behavior and being coked out of his mind, Skye sticks around just long enough to witness Lewis succumb to the smile entity and bash his own brains in with a weight plate.

From there, Smile 2 follows the same basic structure as its predecessor, delivering diminishing returns on scares until it reaches the only logical conclusion for a story about a popstar suffering from a transferable curse. Endings are not only the most crucial part of a movie but also the hardest to nail. Smile 2’s ending, while setting up the franchise to continue as long as Finn—or, more importantly, Paramount—wants, feels so painfully obvious as the creative starting point for this sequel that you can’t help but feel too many steps ahead of the movie to care.

The blueprint is simple: the Smile movies are an everlasting series of trauma-core character studies where the audience watches someone’s psyche completely unravel in a never-ending “hurt people hurt people” metaphor. It’s a dour proposition, and Finn’s attempts to lighten the mood with some comedy do little to change the fact that you’re essentially asked to watch someone barrel toward an inevitable suicide. If the Smile movies had more conviction in their supposed mean-spiritedness, I’d honestly respect Finn for making a paying audience sit through that dreadful level for two hours. But much like how the sequel’s latest crop of baseball game marketing stunts broke character when a foul ball came their way, Smile 2 flinches.

Take the Joel character, for example. Exploring a scenario in which a cop is haunted by a malevolent entity he knows he can escape if he just kills someone could be both timely and terrifying, but the movie passes on its own home-run premise in favor of a—being generous here—double about a popstar. Lionized as they are, popstars rank among the least relatable people on the planet. While their lives are undoubtedly isolating and conducive to a horror premise, they aren’t necessarily conducive to audience empathy. That’s not to say Naomi Scott doesn’t give her damnedest to make the audience care about Skye Riley; her performance would be receiving awards buzz if the Academy could get its head out of its collective ass regarding horror.

It's just difficult to invest in the events of a film when most of them can be written off as existing solely inside the main character’s head. There’s no denying Finn’s competence as a director; his staging is quite good, and although his over-reliance on jump scares is annoying, he may have a better understanding of the mechanics of a scare than many of his contemporaries. More importantly, Finn excels at eliciting genuinely compelling performances from his actors, whose palpable terror helps carry the load for his deficiency in atmosphere building. Finn steps up his game behind the camera in this sequel, crafting sequences that suggest he not only has a rip-roaring action movie in him but perhaps even a musical.

That being said, Finn still hasn’t found a way to elide the commercial sheen of the two Smile films. Gorey as they try to be, it always feels like the film’s imagery toes the acceptable studio R-rated horror movie line but never crosses it. Perhaps this is just a byproduct of unfortunate release date scheduling; it’s hard to be the grisly, hard-R horror film when you’re following Art the Clown, after all. Still, there’s something to be said about how the commerciality of these movies robs them of any sense of staying power once the credits roll. As much as both Smile films posture as exercises in hopelessness, the only truly nihilistic aspect is that each one ends with a definitive setup for seemingly endless franchise installments.