I watched the first movie when it came out at the cinema, so when the sequel came out at the cinema, I was immediately interested in watching it.
If you’ve seen the first movie, then you’ll probably have a fairly good idea of what to expect from this one. It pretty much picks up only a short time after the original, with Joel (the police officer cursed at the end of Smile) trying desperately to find someone to pass the Smile curse onto. His initial intention is to subject a murderous criminal to the curse…but, of course, if the curse had been passed onto a bad guy, the movie would be very different to the one we got.
The curse passes on to a drug dealer, Lewis, who doesn’t have a very big role to play…outside of being the person who passes the curse onto the main character of the movie, Skye Riley. Still, even though he doesn’t appear much in the movie, I felt that Lukas Gage did a really good job of portraying Lewis after he was infected by the Smile entity.
As is made clear in the first movie, the Smile entity feeds on trauma…but all of its victims seem to have more trauma than just seeing someone else kill themselves. I don’t know what kind of trauma Lewis was suffering, but there was a video he posted to social media that seemed to hint at a deeper kind of trauma that hadn’t been explored.
Skye Riley was an interesting character in this movie. She’d obviously had some very traumatic events in her life prior to witnessing Lewis kill himself in front of her (in an extremely gruesome way, to be honest; the movie does not hold back on the gore). I liked that the movie didn’t reveal everything that had happened all at once, instead showing more and more through the flashbacks as the movie went on.
I also found it easy to empathise with Skye, especially seeing how she was treated as an object by everyone around her, from her mother, who was her manager, to her fans…including a man who was clearly a stalker and who is later used by the Smile entity to toy with Skye even more.
One of the main things the Smile entity does is play with its victims’ minds, leaving them unsure of what’s real and what isn’t. The movie does a really good job of showing this at times, but there’s a whole scene in Skye’s apartment with her backup dancers coming at her. This is obviously not real, and something that, in my opinion, kind of pushed the movie into (perhaps unintentional) comedy.
Sadly, although there were some good parts to the movie, it fell into the same trap of so many other horror movies I’ve seen, and the same kind of trap that the first Smile movie fell into. As soon as the entity appears in its own form, it loses a lot of the horror and fear that the movie’s built up to, because what you don’t see is always scarier than what you do see. (It Follows was a really good example of this).
I did enjoy this movie for what it was, but I don’t think I’d get anything out of watching it a second time. There were some very predictable scenes and, of course, the movie did end on a cliffhanger. If you did enjoy the first Smile movie, though, you’ll probably enjoy this one too.
Ink of Blood 