“Smile 2” goes for more terror and fear in the same playground, and I enjoyed it more than expected. While it is not so different from its predecessor in terms of story setting, the movie gives us a wilder and flashier version packed with enough mood and a darkly vicious sense of humor, and it is also supported well by the strong performance at its center.

The movie begins at the point not long after what happened at the end of “Smile” (2022). As many of you remember, the heroine of “Smile” sadly failed to free herself from some horribly powerful supernatural entity, and she only ended up getting possessed and then committed “suicide” right in front of her cop boyfriend. Six days later, he is also driven to the edge as that evil entity is now stalking him, and he devises his own desperate plan for freeing himself and stopping that evil entity. Unfortunately, his plan does not go well at all just like his girlfriend’s case, and he only comes to get that evil entity transferred to some young drug addict before he also gets killed in the end.

This young drug addict happens to be a friend of Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a very famous pop star singer who has been trying to be sober and clean after having a devastating car accident due to her addiction problem around one year ago. When she comes to her addict friend’s apartment for getting some painkiller to dull her frequent pain in the back, he has been already quite unhinged due to that evil entity, and, of course, Riley soon becomes the very next target after he eventually gets possessed and then killed.

While trying to recover from this shocking incident, Riley soon comes to realize that something is going very, very, very wrong around her. She begins to have quite frightening nightmares, and then she frequently sees that disturbing smile from others around her. As these happenings get worse and worse to her horror, she becomes more confused about what is real or not, and she even receives the warning texts from a mysterious figure who seems to know well about what is really happening to her right now.

However, Riley does not have anyone who can really help her. Her mother, who has worked as her manager for years, is more occupied with pushing her daughter more for more success along with an executive from some influential recording company. In case of a young woman who was once Riley’s best friend, they have been estranged from each other since the time around when that accident happened, though Riley comes to consider calling her friend for reconciliation and some help as being terrorized more and more by that evil entity.

As that evil entity frequently throws Riley into a series of unnerving mind-bending moments, director/writer Parker Finn, who is also the director/writer of “Smile”, and his crew members including cinematographer Charlie Sarroff have some naughty fun with vividly and strikingly presenting the heroine’s worsening plight. The movie sometimes emphasizes its heroine’s increasingly unstable state of mind with odd camera angles, and the accumulating sense of dread across the screen is further amplified by the score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer.

In terms of story and character, the movie generates interesting resonance between the story setting and its heroine’s profession. Even before she is cornered to the extreme by that evil entity, Skye has already been driven to the edge due to not only her mother and several others around her but also thousands of fans out there, and the movie makes some sharp points on that while also giving us several big moments of music and dance as required.

Good horror films usually have someone for whom we can fear at least, and Naomi Scott, who has been mainly known for her lead performance in “Aladdin”, willingly hurls herself into her high-strung lead character. In addition to handling well the musical scenes in the movie, Scott deftly goes up and down along with her character as palpably conveying to us her character’s terror and confusion, and she surely demonstrates more of her considerable talent and presence here in this film. It goes without saying that Riley is doomed from the very beginning, but Scott is still compelling enough to hold our attention to the end, and the result is another memorable horror movie performance to remember.

In case of several main cast members surrounding Scott, they are more or less than the background figures revolving around her grand performance, but some of them leave some impression nonetheless. While Rosemarie DeWitt is sometimes terrifying as Riley’s demanding mother, Peter Jacobson and Dylan Gelula are also well-cast as two different supporting characters who may actually help Riley, and Ray Nicholson, who is incidentally the son of Jack Nicholson, briefly appears as Riley’s dead boyfriend who got killed during that accident. I need to see more of Nicholson for confirming whether he is a good actor just like his legendary father (He recently played a minor supporting role in “Promising Young Woman” (2020) and “Licorice Pizza” (2021), by the way), but he inherits that killer smile from his daddy, and the movie and that evil entity effectively utilize it.

In conclusion, “Smile 2” is a solid sequel to be appreciated for its several strong points including Scott’s terrific performance, which compensate enough for is familiar story setting and rather overlong running time (127 minutes). Finn shows here that he is indeed a talented filmmaker as observed from his previous film, and it will be interesting to see what he will do next after the considerable achievement in his first two feature films.