Parker Finn’s 2022 feature debut, Smile, was transparently molded from chain-possession horror like The Ring and It Follows, in which a death curse is passed from one victim to the next while the agonized protagonist tries to wriggle out of it. Despite its familiarity, the movie worked, in part because the writer-director brought plenty of style and sustained anxiety to the derivative premise but also because the means of transferal was so disturbingly ordinary — a big toothy grin. The film cost a modest $17 million to make and grossed north of $200 million worldwide, which made a sequel inevitable.

Cut to Smile 2, which trades Sosie Bacon’s clinical psychiatrist for Naomi Scott’s Skye Riley, a global pop superstar riddled with trauma for the sinister entity to feast on. That means a switch from a main character whose professional training and troubled personal history gave her a few insights into her addled state to a Katy Perry-Lady Gaga hybrid who’s such a jittery mess she never stands much of a chance. Which doesn’t mean the well-acted movie isn’t a fun time, clobbering you with a barrage of effective jump scares and blood-drenched visions. But it does mean that restraint gets jettisoned in favor of bigger, bolder excess. Any film with a special credit for “monstrosity effects” is not going for subtlety.

Audiences hooked the first time around will likely be back for more, which should give Paramount a head start on the Halloween box office. If Smile 2 is another hit, don’t be surprised to see the franchise continue, especially since this one ends with the promise of contagion on a considerably larger scale.  

Finn picks up the action just six days after the events of the first film, with nice-guy cop Joel (Kyle Gallner) sitting in his parked car trembling with dread, having paid the price for helping his rattled ex-girlfriend. Determined to dispose of the curse responsibly, he slips on a balaclava and moves in on the home of two murderous drug-dealer brothers, intending to kill one while making the other watch, before sealing the second guy’s fate when he puts on a happy face.

That plan goes about as far south as it could go in the wild pre-titles sequence, which is bad news for Lewis (Lukas Gage), the low-level dealer who wanders into the chaos. The macabre sense of humor that factors throughout is evident in the remains of one casualty, whose blood and guts are smeared across the road in — you guessed it — the shape of a smile.

Meanwhile, Skye is preparing to come back from a year out of the spotlight following a near-fatal car crash in which her actor boyfriend Paul (Ray Nicholson) was killed. Photos of her strung out on alcohol and cocaine have been splashed all over the tabloids, but now she’s clean and ready to kick off a major tour, starting in New York City. She gives her first public interview since the accident on The Drew Barrymore Show, whose host seems only mildly self-conscious playing herself.

Pushed by her manager mother Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt) and pampered by her adoring assistant Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), Skye throws herself into rehearsals. When the vigorous choreography aggravates her back injury from the crash, she keeps it to herself but contacts her former dealer to score some Vicodin. That of course would be Lewis, an old high school acquaintance, who’s coked to the gills and deep in the grip of paranoid delusions when Skye arrives. What she witnesses is truly disturbing, leaving her with no painkillers but plenty of pain.

The filmmaking craft is a considerable step up here from Smile, with returning DP Charlie Sarroff making clever use of disorienting angles and mirror shots, and again flipping the frame upside-down as Skye begins unraveling. There’s a hint of De Palma in the moody lighting and creepy accelerated zoom-ins when she starts seeing menacing visions of both strangers and people she knows, their faces transformed by the Joker grin.

Dan Kenyon’s dense sound design is another highly effective component, often blurring the lines between ambient noise and composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s chilling score, which incorporates clanking, groaning, juddering industrial sounds and leans heavily into distortion.

Scott is terrific at showing the way Skye’s terror plays into her guilt over the people she hurt when her substance abuse issues were out of control. That conflict also makes her to want to keep fulfilling the professional obligations of photo shoots, sound checks, costume fittings and more rehearsals.

Despite her daughter’s escalating series of meltdowns, Elizabeth pushes Skye to stick to the schedule, reminding her that the record company, headed by Darius (Raúl Castillo), has invested millions in the tour. “You need to stay hydrated,” her mother keeps telling her, which yields an amusing running product-placement joke as Skye chugs down endless bottles of Voss water.

One standout early scene is a fan meet-and-greet, where Joshua manages a long line of gushing admirers, ushering them over one at a time for an autograph and photo. Skye is warm and patient with them at first, until an unhinged obsessive freaks her out. (It won’t be the last she sees of him, at least in her head.) No sooner has she regained her composure than a preteen girl in pigtails gets to the front of the line, baring her braces in that unmistakably maniacal grin that haunts Skye’s dreams and her waking hours.

The uncertain shuffling between what’s real and what’s a very visceral hallucination ultimately becomes a weakness as the story progresses, even if some of the latter sequences are virtuoso set pieces.

One in particular is a knockout, in which Skye sees the dancers from her show assembled in the doorway of her apartment with leering smiles. Each time she looks away to reassure herself it’s just her imagination, they move nearer, straddling the furniture and climbing the walls like demonic Fosse chorus kids. As they close in on her, their movements become violent echoes of the choreography we saw in rehearsal.

Another key sequence is a “Music Inspires Hope” fundraiser for underprivileged youth, at which Darius has persuaded Skye to be a presenter. Freshly traumatized but unable to back out of it, Skye unsettles the gala crowd by winging it when the teleprompter fails, her speech about the harrowing side of the music industry proving anything but hopeful. The awkwardly timed appearance of her dead boyfriend, smiling like a madman, doesn’t help.

Skye gets temporary comfort when she repairs the broken bond with her ride-or-die best friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula), whose droll reactions to horrific revelations (“Eww”) make you wish we saw more of her. Then there are the anonymous texts from someone who seems to know exactly what Skye is going through. He’s eventually revealed to be Morris (Peter Jacobson), who has intimate knowledge of the parasitic spirit and a theory about how to neutralize it.

As Skye resists and then agrees in desperation to try Morris’ dangerous removal method, Finn starts losing the narrative grip. The film lurches in and out of reality in ways clearly meant to mirror what Skye is experiencing. But as the shifts become more frequent, punctuated by interludes of increasingly gory violence, it also has a disengaging effect.

While Scott is never less than compelling, a famous, wealthy pop icon is already a less relatable principal character than the first film’s grounded therapist, whose race against the clock to understand and overcome her affliction gave Smile the structural bones of a procedural. Skye is a wreck from the moment of her fateful contact, and watching an unstable protagonist get bludgeoned by terror in a world where almost nothing seems real is less gripping than watching one who’s actively fighting for her survival.

As the sequel ascends into Grand Guignol grotesquerie in Skye’s ultimate ordeal, it becomes less chilling than distancing. The elements that made Smile get under your skin are sacrificed in bloody spectacle and the relative simplicity of the conceit gets muddied as the movie pushes beyond the two-hour mark.

Smile 2 confirms Finn as a gifted visual stylist who has an assured hand with his actors. He perhaps just needs to back off a little from the misconception that more is more and maintain a greater focus on his story skills. Still, there’s much to be said for a director so unencumbered by timidity, and the sequel will leave plenty of horror fans grinning from ear to ear.