Smile 2’s ending makes a case for a bigger stage

It doesn’t take much to see Smile 2’s ending coming. This is not an insult; predictability is nothing to denigrate, if done right, and Smile 2 certainly provides the perverse pleasures that make the foregone conclusion really sing. With Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) in the final days of prep before the Madison Square Garden opening for her tour, still recovering from an accident that almost killed her, struggling with addiction and a drug dealer who killed himself smiling — well, it all starts to feel like Chekhov’s comeback tour. We don’t even have to see the final shot to know what Skye’s haunting beam means when she twirls on stage, or what it means for her audience: The end is nigh.

And in my book, that goes double for the Smile franchise.

What makes Smile 2 work is the way it builds off the first one. It’s the “girl, so confusing” remix of Smile: intractably linked to the thoughts and themes and rules and scares of the original. Undeniably an improvement and advancement of its ideas and artistry. Director Parker Finn finds new ways to let the Smile demon circle Skye, plucking away her defenses the same way she pulls at her hair. It comes as dance mobs and bedmates and long-lost friends. It’s a window to her past and she’s getting pulled out of it to plummet. Though that haunting grin may always twist the knife in the same way, no two attacks on her senses are the same, leaving her (and us) constantly unmoored.

For as much as I enjoyed Smile 2, this all makes watching the movie a profoundly miserable experience. The unrelentingly grim world of the movie doesn’t leave a lot of options for Skye, and each new public outburst is its own knife to the gut, whether it leaves a mark or not. To watch it is to see someone’s life is falling away until they’re finally fully gone; this demon plays by only a few rules, and one of them is that the house always wins.

Smile 2 is aware of this fact; in the parlance of Friends, it knows we know, and it’s going all in. While the first one lets Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) think she’s won, only to pull back the curtain and reveal her final fight has all been another hallucination, Smile 2’s whole final act is a hazy vision. It ups the ante by introducing one psych after another, until she spills out on stage, as we always knew she would. It’s an elegant expansion of the thudding ending of the first: Rose’s emotional breakthrough didn’t save her, but neither will Skye’s attempts to succumb to her darkest demons. It’s an evolution to the Smile demon ethos that didn’t seem possible after the first one, and, having scarred and condemned an arena full of fans, one that has played out the logical conclusion to this chain of anguish.

Which is exactly why Smile 2 should be the end of the franchise as we know it. Smile 2 takes the idea to its logical conclusion: The Smile demon has hit the big time, cursing some 19,500 people at once. There’s no controlling it anymore. The trauma is loose, and will likely spread at logarithmic levels. And if the Smile franchise has taught us anything so far, it’s that there’s only one way out.

Finn has proven himself a smart director with a keen eye for using spaces and building dread; locking him into the Smile demon’s game is an unnecessary limit on a horror director who deserves to see how far he can flex. Sure, the studio could keep mining him (or someone else) for a sequel here, but to what end? If the end is always a foregone conclusion, the bag of tricks turned over, and each journey just a different version of an artfully crafted hall of misery, then what’s left?

The answer should the end of everything, one way or another. Either Smile as a franchise needs to take a break, or they need to commit to the new world order that Skye’s big moment has unleashed. A Smile 3 would need to show us what happens when a demonic virus turns into an epidemic, multiplying faster than you can muster a grin. The metaphor, loose as it is in this franchise, could shift to those who have retreated from society, maybe centering on preppers who show how you might leave the world but that you can’t really escape it. You could even go full post-apocalyptic; something like Bird Box or A Quiet Place with the threat of a smirk as the omen of evil. There’s options! But they need to follow the escalation Smile 2 has written them into. If Skye’s descent already delivered the franchise’s final note, then it was a helluva ride. Now it’s time for a bigger stage.

Smile 2 is now playing in theaters.