Smile 2 is a terrifying supernatural horror movie, but the true source of its horror is hidden beneath its scares, and comes from the tragic tale of its protagonist Skye Riley (Naomi Scott). First seen in Parker Finn‘s 2022 horror movie Smile, the Smile Entity, as it has come to be known, is a vicious, ethereal monster who tortures its victims for a week before finally destroying their minds completely, possessing them, and forcing them to take their own lives. The Smile Entity also makes sure that its victim’s deaths are witnessed by someone else, with the Entity then being passed onto the witness to terrorize them into another horrible death.
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In Smile 2, pop star and recovering drug addict Skye Riley becomes the latest individual to be unfortunately afflicted with the Entity’s curse after witnessing her high school friend turned drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) take his life while possessed the demon. Skye is then bedeviled with the Entity’s hauntings for another week before it possesses and kills her in front of a concert arena full of thousands of cheering fans (which itself sets up huge implications for Smile 3). While Skye’s demise in Smile 2 is as horrifying as it is tragic, one detail about her character arc in the movie makes it even more of a gut punch, that being the simple fact of Skye’s own determination to move on from the mistakes of her past.
Skye Really Was Trying to Turn Her Life Around
When we meet Skye Riley in Smile 2, she seems poised for an epic comeback after a turn of events that nearly killed her. Despite her successful stint in rehab and everyone cheering her on for her comeback tour, Smile 2‘s moments with Skye behind closed doors reveal that she’s still a deeply troubled person under a lot of pressure with the scale of her comeback tour, the entire world having her under a microscope, and as we see in a flashback, Skye living with the guilt that she caused the car accident that killed her boyfriend Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson). However, despite all of this weighing down on her, Skye spends all of Smile 2 making a genuinely earnest effort to turn over a new leaf.
Despite her mother/manger Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), her support team, and her record label doing everything possible to shove Skye back on stage when she clearly needs to take a break from public life and performing (none of them seeming to notice or care that Skye’s hit single “New Brain” is a clear cry for help.) Nevertheless, Skye still does everything she can to make the best of it. She puts on a happy face at autograph signings and talk shows, reaches out to her old friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula) to make amends after the schism she caused between them, and commits herself to grueling rehearsals for her upcoming tour, all to prove to her family, friends, colleagues, the entire world, and ultimately herself that she can climb back from her own self-inflicted downfall. Most importantly of all, Skye never once indulges in the very thing that ruined her life in the first place.
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Imagine being haunted by a demonic entity that takes on the likeness of people you know grinning at you with a sinister smile, causes you to see and experience events that never happened, makes you paranoid and belligerent to everyone around you, causes you to have explosive public meltdowns, and puts the worst event of your life in your face constantly. Now imagine experiencing that, AND you’re an internationally beloved pop star just coming out of rehab for substance abuse, AND you’re being asked to perform live on stage in front of millions of people. That’s what Skye has to go through in Smile 2, but despite the entity’s aggressive hauntings, Skye never touches drugs or alcohol again.
And it’s certainly not like Skye isn’t feeling the temptation to relapse, either. As Skye explains to Gemma, her rehab doctor advised her to drink a glass of water any time she feels the urge to consume drugs or alcohol, and as the entity’s hauntings intensify, Skye drinks a LOT of water. Indeed, a quick glimpse into a draw in Skye’s apartment kitchen shows bottle after bottle of Voss water, but the brand isn’t mere product placement in Smile 2, but an indicator that Skye knew that beating her drug and alcohol addiction would require a lot of discipline and willpower on her part. Skye’s nervous tick of pulling clumps of her hair out in stressful situations also highlights just how much she’s feeling the terror the Entity instills in her.
It’d certainly be very tempting for a recovering drug addict to revert to their old self-destructive habit with a supernatural being terrorizing them. With the added pressure of Skye being a household name preparing to embark on a comeback tour, it’s genuinely amazing that she resists the urge to give into her old ways as a means of simply staving off the Entity’s psychological attacks (not that it would have been likely to work anyway, given the Entity’s ability to infect its victim’s mind). Even when Skye goes to her drug dealer friend Lewis early on in Smile 2, she’s seeking Vicodin strictly to alleviate the chronic back pain she’s dealt with since her car accident, and only goes through such under-the-radar means of getting it “because I have a history of substance abuse, no one will prescribe me anything stronger than Tylenol”. Clearly, Skye learned her lesson after what cocaine and alcohol did to her, and no amount of prodding by the demon can get her to return to either.
Skye’s Determination To Get Her Life Back on Track Makes Her a Very Tragic Protagonist in Smile 2
Just as much as Rose Cotter (Susie Bacon) in the original Smile, Skye Riley is a deeply tragic figure haunted and ultimately killed by a savagely cruel demonic being. What makes Skye’s story even more heartbreaking is the fact that she really did have a shot at not just getting back to the top of pop music world, but of simply getting her life back together.
True, Skye isn’t an entirely innocent figure either, considering that she caused the car accident that killed Paul, but she also redeems herself in the end with her attempt to purge the Entity from her mind by stopping her heart with a chemical compound (Skye’s nurse ally Morris not being present at that point to revive Skye, as the two had originally planned), Skye selflessly intoning “It doesn’t matter what happens to me anymore, but I won’t let this thing use me to hurt anyone else”. The Smile Entity’s cruelty and ability to manipulate Skye’s mind, even letting her briefly think she had won, was the only thing that stopped Skye from freeing herself of it and getting her life back as she had been trying to do for the whole movie. The fact that Skye Riley could very well have pulled off a career rebound and gotten her life back together is the real tragic horror of Smile 2, exemplifying that the Entity’s viciousness to destroy the life of a recovering drug addict who simply wanted her old life back.
Smile 2 is available to stream on Paramount+.
