The ending of Parker Finn’sSmile 2was a bit of a shock to the audiences who watched the movie and the audience in the actual film. The brutal ending seems to inevitably doom the future of thehorrorfranchise. The ending sequence is bold and daring regarding where it takes the franchise, butSmile 2and its predecessor subtly present a loophole that could potentiallysave the next installmentfrom the movie’s shocking ending.
Just asSmiledid,Smile 2reveals that a portion of the story took place inside the protagonist’s fractured mind. This time around, it’s pop star Skye Riley’s (Naomi Scott) haunted mind. Nevertheless, only the last ten minutes ofSmiletake place inside Rose’s (Sosie Bacon) mind, but it seems a sizable portion ofSmile 2takes place inside Skye’s head.
Read Our ReviewThe movie ends with Skye waking up onstage only to realize that she had hallucinated the entire time she’d been up there. Based on the concert outfit she’s wearing (which she had tried on much earlier in the movie) and her mother in the audience (whom she had supposedly killed in a previous scene), it’s tough to decipher how much of the film’s events were real.
Upon waking up, Skye is finally confronted by the Smile entity in its true demon form. She then flashes the audience the signature smile donned by each victim of the entity, before violently stabbing her microphone into her eye socket. Based on everything theSmilemovies have taught us, it appears the entire concert audience could be in trouble.
How Does the Smile Demon Choose a Host?
The way the entity is passed from victim to victim is fairly straightforward. A person infected by the entity suffers from the haunting visions and hallucinations it causes, and has seven days before the entity’s presence within them causes the infected person to viciously take their own lives. If the person kills themselves in front of a witness, the entity is then passed on to the witness, and the cycle continues.
In the first movie, Rose and her ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner) learn there’s a way to pass the entity on without taking their lives. If a person haunted by the entity commits a murder in front of a witness, then the entity is passed on to the witness, and the infected person should live.Joel accomplishes this in the opening ofSmile 2, although his plan goes horribly awry.
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Since Skye took her life in front of an arena filled with thousands of her fans, it feels safe to assume the entity has been passed on to every single person in the room that night. That thought process follows the logic of the way every victim has been infected by the entity thus far. Therefore,Smile 3would see thousands of people haunted by the entity’s visions and have potentially dozens of new storylines to follow. That’s a tall order for any franchise to have to follow, but luckily the franchise has already revealed a secret to avoid such a convoluted plot.
All the victims in the movies so far have one specific trait in common: Every victim suffers from severe survivor’s guilt, meaning not every attendee at the concert would be susceptible to the demon entity. Both Rose and Skye felt tremendous guilt for the death of their mom and boyfriend, respectively.
The Demon Is Drawn to Victims With Survivor’s Guilt
Smile 2’s opening follows Joel as he desperately tries to rid himself of the entity’s curse. After enduring the trauma of seeing Rose die in front of him, he became susceptible to the entity because he felt like he could have saved her.
Every victim so far has had some degree of survivor’s guilt. Rose’s patient in the first movie felt guilty for witnessing her roommate taking their own life, Rose felt guilty about her mother’s death,Joel felt responsible for Rose’s death, and Lewis (Lukas Gage) was traumatized by witnessing Joel murder his drug dealers. After learning that Skye not only felt guilty about her boyfriend’s death but played a hand in it, her survivor’s guilt may have been the most intense of all.
What Happened to Joel Between ‘Smile’ and ‘Smile 2’?
‘Smile 2’ saw the return of the creepy smiling entity from the first movie. But what happened to Joel in between the two movies?
It seems blatantly obvious that the Smile demon only preys on those with tremendous guilt and remorse. People dealing with grief and guilt are more psychologically vulnerable since they are wrestling with their emotions, making it easy for the entity to swoop in. The protagonists of both movies were easy targets for the entity, especially considering Skye was partially responsible for her boyfriend’s death. It appears that the demon can’t pick its victims at random, but instead can only feed on those who are experiencing intense guilt.
How This Secret Will Help Set Up ‘Smile 3’
The future of the franchise seemed ultimately doomed until realizing the loophole the first film provided. A third installment that tries to tackle the mental deterioration of thousands of concertgoers would feel more akin to a disaster movie than a singular psychological horror. It would make for a far less interesting and engaging story, and would likely be somewhat hard to follow. Since it seems as though the entity can only be passed on to vulnerable people, only some of the fans who attended the concert would be cursed.
If the third installment followed the inevitable psychosis of thousands of people, it would lose the isolated atmosphere that made the first two unnerving. The singular viewpoint is what allows the franchise to feel scary at times.
Both protagonists so far have experienced thehaunting curse the Smile demonlays upon them on their own. No one believes them until it is too late, and there’s no one to witness the entity in action. The thought of experiencing something like that all alone is terrifying itself. If the filmmakers follow the secret they revealed in the first movie, it would maintain the novelty of the series and avoid an unnecessary tonal shift in the franchise.
