In 2022, Parker Finn had one of the surprise horror hits of the year with Smile, starring Sosie Bacon and Kyle Gallner. With a story about a demonic entity who latches on to its victims and kills them before being passed on to the next, Smile felt a lot like It Follows while also going in its own direction with its lead characters. Bacon plays a therapist who is dealing with her own issues even before the monster shows up in her life. The success of Smile led to Parker Finn returning to direct Smile 2 in 2024. This time our lead is Naomi Scott‘s Skye Riley, a famous pop star who is in the midst of her own Hell before the movie’s plot begins.
Sequels are always meant to be bigger and badder than the original film and Smile 2 follows this tradition, giving us a heroine with more influence and subjecting her to suffering on a much larger scale. Upon reflection, Smile 2 has a lot in common with Darren Aronofsky‘s Oscar-winning Black Swan, both following an artist pushed to insanity due to the demands of their profession. The only difference is that in Black Swan our lead is a ballerina, and in Smile 2 we follow a singer. Oh, and the latter also has a demon entity that will haunt you until it kills you.
Nina Sayers and Skye Riley Are Women Under Immense Pressure
In 2010’s Black Swan, Natalie Portman plays a ballerina named Nina Sayers. She is well respected, but she’s a perfectionist, pushed to be the best by herself and everyone around her. Skye Riley goes through a similar transformation in Smile 2. When we meet Skye, she appears to have it all as a famous pop star, but there’s nothing perfect about her life. Skye is preparing for a comeback tour because something traumatic happened to her. We don’t know what it was exactly, outside of drug abuse issues, but her body is healing from some great harm. She is a nervous wreck about the tour, and as she begins to see a smiling demon following her at every turn, putting on a good show becomes the farthest thing from her mind.
The immense pressure Nina and Skye go through is not just from business types and lackeys who are only concerned about what these women can do for them financially. What’s most heartbreaking for them is that their own mothers are the worst of all. They are missing their protectors. For Nina in Black Swan, her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), used to be a ballerina too. You’d think this would make her more understanding of the pressure Nina is under and the physical pain she experiences, but Erica instead only pushes her harder. In Smile 2, Skye’s mother, Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), is no former ballerina but seems like your everyday mom who lucked into her daughter becoming a rich and famous singer. Like Erica, she’s living through her child and refuses to let go of the excitement and purpose that being her manager brings. This forces Nina and Skye to go through their journeys alone.
‘Black Swan’ and ‘Smile 2’ Use Body Horror To Tell Their Story
Black Swan might be a psychological horror movie first and foremost, but it’s also body horror. Nina is so stressed that she scratches at herself. She starves herself to look a certain way, and her feet are falling apart due to her excessive rehearsals. We are watching not just this woman’s mind, but also her body, break down before us. It gets even more gross when Nina starts to rip the skin off of a finger or starts pulling swan feathers out of her back (or so she hallucinates). The most sickening scene of all shows her leg breaking and forming into a swan leg. Maybe it’s not happening in reality, but in her mind, it’s very real.
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‘Smile 2’s Tense Opening Scene Shows What Director Parker Finn Should Do Next
Kyle Gallner channels Jodie Foster in this tense opener.
Smile 2 uses body horror as well to show us how Skye Riley is breaking down mentally. It’s not just the gory scenes of Joel’s (Gallner) shocking death in the first scene, or Skye watching a friend kill himself in gory fashion right in front of her; it’s also what the demon is showing to her in moments that are only in her mind. Most notable is her concert rehearsal when she hallucinates her leg breaking. Like Nina, no one else can see it, but the pain is real for her.
Both Black Swan and Smile 2 use shocking visuals to tell the story of inner turmoil. One woman might be battling a demon that’s more literal, but both are doomed from the beginning, leading to tragic endings. In the former, Nina is threatened by the arrival of a new ballerina, Lily (Mina Kunis), leading to her stabbing her rival. That ends up being just another hallucination, as it turns out that Nina has stabbed herself. Dying, she goes to the stage for one last performance. In Smile 2, the demon thrusts Skye out of a fake reality it has trapped her in to force her to perform at her big comeback concert in front of an adoring crowd. There, the mother she killed is seen to be alive, just like Lily. The demon then takes over Skye’s body, killing her in front of everyone (with way more gore than what Nina goes through). Both Nina and Skye Riley had their lives end in front of an audience. With their existence all about performance, their deaths had to become art.
There Is a Warning Message About Celebrity Worship in ‘Black Swan’ and ‘Smile 2’
What Nina in Black Swan and Skye in Smile 2 experience is also a warning call and a representation of what young, famous women go through. Unlike male celebrities, women must always look a certain way and are held to a much higher standard than their male contemporaries. For a woman in performance art to stop and take a break is seen as a sign of weakness. Do that, and you can be replaced by your rival ballerina, or a younger pop star, and be forgotten forever.
This is how it so often is for so many celebrities. Their lives are all about the spotlight to the point that it becomes hard to tell what’s real. Just like the demon, we feed on celebrity worship, following these stars relentlessly until they give out. Then we eat them whole and move on to the next fad, or, in the case of the demon in Smile 2, the next victim. The tragedy of Skye Riley is that she is self-aware. She might be having hallucinations due to the demon invading her life, but Skye hasn’t lost her mind. She knows she’s overworked, but no one will listen. For Nina, she is so lost that she gives her life, with her last words being, “I was perfect.” Dying for perfection is the worst demon of all.
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