Man, Naomi Scott gave everything she had to Smile 2 to convey Skye Riley’s grief, trauma, and struggle. One of the most memorable horror performances in recent memory. And Skye feels very much of the times, because we’re in an era of celebrity that’s more stressful, more crushing, and more tragic than ever before. The statement made by having Skye’s demise occur on stage, in public, is a powerful one.
Smile 2’s ending explained
Should we focus on what happened or what it means?
The end of Smile 2 raises a lot of questions. That’s to be expected when most of the final 30 minutes never happened. Skye didn’t murder her mother with a shard of glass. She did not flee the treatment facility. She didn’t speed off to Staten Island. And she did not meet Morris in an abandoned Pizza Hut to try and cure herself of the smile entity. All of that was a complex hallucination created by the entity to feed on Skye’s stress, pain, and torment.
Part of me wants to spend a lot of words trying to figure out how all this would work. Was Skye’s body on autopilot that whole time? She had to go to Madison Square Garden, have her makeup done, get into costume. So like…what was that like? Did she still have conversations with people? Did she go through vocal warmups? Was she joking and smiling? Or just like…in a stupor and no one cared? Was she ever in a treatment facility? When did the hallucination actually start? If Gemma was always the entity, does that mean everything from Gemma’s first appearance in the apartment was hallucination? Did Skye actually give that speech at the charity event? Did she knock that old lady off stage? Did Morris exist?
But I know that’s going down the wrong rabbit hole. Because the point of Smile 2 isn’t to figure out what’s real and not real. The point is what Smile 2 says about celebrity. The entity is a metaphor for the sense of burden that celebrities feel, the strain that builds over time. So while you can get caught up in the logistics of how Skye acted in real life during her extended hallucination, it’s probably worth spending more brain power on asking “what does the disconnect represent?”
Real life and stage life
One semi-advanced technique that’s great to understand is “parallelism”. For example, say early in a movie there’s a shot where a character opens a closet door, reaches in, and pulls out a present to give to their partner. How sweet! But during the film, the relationship falls apart. At the end, it’s that same shot of the character opening the closet door. They reach in. Except instead of pulling out a present, it’s a pre-packed suitcase. They leave the room. You hear keys. The front door shuts. And then the credits roll.
By using a similar shot and similar action (reaching into the closet), you create a formal parallel between the scene with the gift and the scene with the exit. The latter recalls the former and creates a tragic contrast. What had been a happy relationship ends in a breakup.
Good writers use parallels a lot. They’re an excellent way to create juxtaposition and convey change. And they’re often poetic. The most common use of parallel is the full circle moment where the end resonates with the beginning. Parallel editing (also known as cross-cutting) is also very popular. The famous Jaws music is a soundtrack parallel. Each time we hear it, we think of the previous shark attacks.
So how does that apply to Smile 2?
When we first meet Skye, what’s the context? She’s on the Drew Barrymore talk show. We’re seeing her public-facing side. The performer giving a “candid” interview. She sounds very vulnerable and honest in her responses to Drew. Quote: I was dealing with a lot of stress and pressure from the demands of the tour. And I should have asked for help, but instead I drowned it all out with drugs and alcohol and a lot of bad decisions. And I let myself get completely out of control. And actually, I want to take this opportunity to apologize to my fans, my loved ones, my team, everyone who was counting on me and supporting me. I let you all down. And I promise that will never happen again.
But then what happens? Drew says, “You were in the hospital. When you got out, what has the time been like between then and now?” Before Skye answers, we flash away from the television show to a memory she has. A memory where she screams in the dark as she rips out a handful of hair. Suddenly her short hair look in the present isn’t simply her “trying something new” but an attempt to make her self-harm into a chic celebrity style.
So we know Skye’s time at home hasn’t been good. But what’s her answer to Drew? Quote: I spent a lot of time looking inward, relearning how to appreciate life sober. And I’m just so grateful for the second chance, and I don’t want to waste it.
It’s the perfect PR response. Euphemistic in all the right ways. It turns what was actually a messy, troubled, and unfinished process of coping with trauma into this empowered, transcendent, finished thing. Which isn’t true.
So right away, Smile 2 establishes this contrast between what Skye says publicly versus what she feels personally. And the next scenes reinforce this dichotomy. Skye is the picture-perfect celebrity everyone wants her to be when out and about. When not in the public eye, she spends her days preparing for tour. But, behind the scenes, she’s in pain. At first it seems that pain is just physical, a byproduct of her car crash. But the entity comes to represent the emotional pain that haunts her personal world.
Skye’s relationship with her mom
So we know Smile 2 has this dichotomy between “Skye Riley, the superstar pop diva” and “Skye Riley, the human struggling with PTSD”. Her public life consistently overwhelms her private life. She’s desperate for someone to help her as a person and not simply serve her as a pop star. That’s most obvious in the relationship with her mom. At no point do we see Elizabeth act like a mom. Her manager hat is always on. She seems to only care about Riley as a performer.
We get the scene at the clinic where Riley confronts her mother.
- Skye: Oh my god. Why is [the tour] all you care about, Mom? You treat me like I’m some f***ing wind-up toy. You don’t give a s**t about me other than the business I bring in!
- Elizabeth: You arrogant little a**hole. I have given up everything for you. Every second of my time. Years of my life. My career. And here I am sacrificing every fiber of my being to support you, and you’re too selfish to see it. You put everyone through absolute hell. And still we support you. But you want to go and throw it all away? Fine. Do it! Throw it away! I don’t care. That’s what everyone expects of you anyway.
- S: I wish you could feel what it’s like to live inside my head.
“But Chris, isn’t that a hallucination and not a real conversation?” That’s the cool thing about metaphor in narrative—it doesn’t matter. The hallucinations represent emotions Skye truly feels. Even if the dialogue “isn’t real” in terms of the plot, it’s real in terms of the commentary. Skye’s mom has prioritized the pop diva over the human. And she doesn’t know what her daughter’s going through.
The meaning of the extended hallucination
So the hallucination where Skye has this fight with her mom, then “stabs her mom to death”, escapes the clinic, realizes the real Gemma never showed up, and tries to cure herself in an abandoned Pizza Hut, is actually all just a way of showing us what it’s like to live inside her head.
In real life, she’s going through all the necessary machinations to get ready for the tour. But in her head, she’s going through hell. In that way, the extended hallucination becomes a parallel of that moment on the Drew show where we cut to Skye pulling out her own hair. That’s what she was thinking about, that’s what she was feeling, but her response was the superficial press-perfect statement.
The hallucination represents a switch from showing us Skye’s outer life to her inner one. It’s an inversion of the interview with Drew, where we only saw a flash of what she was really feeling. Now we’re immersed in it, with no real sense of what’s going on around her. Why, though?
When the personal becomes public
The very end of Smile 2 is this collision of the public and the personal. Everyone in the arena, those thousands of screaming fans, expects to see Skye Riley, the pop star. And what Skye shows them is a demonstration of the terrible, terrible pain she’s kept inside this entire time. She can no longer separate public from private.
There are many horror movies, many horror franchises, where the monster represents grief and trauma. Much of the time, though, the protagonist wins. The Babadook, It Follows, Lights Out, The Invisible Man. Or at least survives (but is changed by the experience): Hereditary, Midsommar, Terrifier 1/2/3. The Smile franchise is a bit unique because grief and trauma always win and cause death. They’re metaphors for what happens when someone can’t process, can’t overcome, can’t find a way to cope. In the first film, the grief was rooted in the loss of a parent. Here, it’s rooted in the crush of celebrity and what happens when someone has no support system.
The public often has no idea what a celebrity’s personal life is like. But every year, there’s another headline about a celebrity who seemingly had it all but succumbed to demons no one knew about. Smile 2 released one day after the death of One Direction member Liam Payne. Just minutes before his death, Payne told another guest at his hotel that “I used to be in a boy band—that’s why I’m so f***ed up.”
We’re in a time where there are more celebrities than ever. And the psychological impact of that lifestyle is something that’s still not understood in a meaningful way. It’s kind of like how it took until the early 2000s for the world to realize how common CTE was in professional athletes. The erratic behavior, even the early deaths, of so many retired athletes suddenly made a lot more sense. Obviously celebrities don’t have CTE from repeated blows to the head, but there’s clearly a psychological phenomenon regarding celebrity mental health that still needs to be defined.
Smile 2 isn’t a medical diagnosis. But it is a contribution to the conversation and a reminder to fans, onlookers, and celebrities alike that fame exacts a cost. You can’t just PR your way through and hope things get better. Not to speak for Parker Finn, but he seems to be implying that the support system behind the scenes is something that makes a difference. The only reason Skye went to Lewis was because she had no one else. All that money, all those connections, but no one to actually help her. And because of that, she ends up somewhere she shouldn’t be and on a path that takes her life.
One last note on parallels
We don’t see what Skye does with the microphone. Instead, we see the audience reaction and hear the mic amplify the crash, crunch, and squishy result. But Skye’s fate parallel’s Lewis’s. We saw Lewis bash his own face with the weightlifting plate. Because of that, we can imagine what it must have looked like when Skye kept jamming the microphone into her eye, over and over again. Finn could get away with not showing that because he had established the parallel, meaning we already knew what the visual was like. It’s a cool use of the technique!
Smile 2 frequently asked questions
Was the entity watching her on TV?
There’s a line where the entity says “I’ve been waiting for you for such a long time.” Which makes it seem like it’s kind of aware of the world and had known Skye existed before infecting her.
When you catch the movie for a second time, you’ll notice that the Drew interview is something we see from the perspective of someone (or something) looking at the TV in Lewis’s apartment. By then, the entity had already taken over Lewis. So there’s something to the idea that it was the one watching the interview, could feel Skye’s pain, and was hoping to one day claim her.
In fact, you could argue that it’s been trying to reach her. And that it’s specifically targeted people in a way to eventually cross paths with Skye. But that’s just based on that line “I’ve been waiting for you for such a long time.” So I wouldn’t argue that it’s an “objective” thing. Rather, just something that you can make your head cannon if you want to.
When did the hallucination start? How long had Skye been hallucinating?
In the main analysis, we discussed how getting into this kind of defeats the purpose of the movie. But if you’re the kind of person who still wants to discuss it…
The most obvious place is the clinic she wakes up in after the attack of the dancers. So everything up to the clinic was real. And then she would have spent a day in the clinic then gone to her show before coming to while on stage.
But I think you could maybe argue that the hallucination started as soon as “Gemma” arrived at her apartment and lasted to the appearance on stage. That would mean Morris never existed. And that Skye never had that disastrous appearance at the charity event. The only confirmation we had that the charity event happened was the scene where she meets Morris and people start filming her and allude to what happened. But that could easily just be part of the entity’s game.
The major flaw in that is the whole “Morris never existed” part. Why would the entity create Morris and provide exposition like that? You could argue it likes to give its host hope so it can then dash that hope. There is that moment where Skye thinks she injected herself and would die and take the entity with her, only for the entity to stop playing along, start laughing, then reveal to Skye that the needle never existed.
Ultimately, again, it doesn’t matter because the “everything was a hallucination” part was a metaphor for the personal pain celebrities try to hide from the world. But, if you’re playing it safe, then the hallucination started at the clinic.
How much time passes between Smile and Smile 2?
It’s been less than two weeks. The first movie ended with the entity infecting Joel. Then this one starts six days later with Joel passing it to Lewis. Then Lewis has a week with it. Skye visits him at the end of that week.
Did Skye really cause the car accident by steering off the cliff?
Yeah, we don’t have any reason to doubt the authenticity of those memories. She tried to kill herself and her boyfriend, Paul Hudson.
Was Smile 2 inspired by Black Swan and Perfect Blue?
The hair pulling made me think of Nina’s scratching in Black Swan. Same with the scene where Elizabeth stabs herself with glass but then Skye realizes she has the glass. That’s like Nina when she goes to visit the older dancer in the hospital.
Then it’s Perfect Blue-y in how Mima struggles under the pressure of performance. Both Mima and Skye have toxic relationships with their manager. And the creepy fan in Smile 2 kind of resembles Mima’s stalker, Me-Mania. Not to mention the whole “I don’t know what’s real and not real” aspect of both stories.
Smile 2 obviously tells its own story, but I’d be surprised if Parker Finn hadn’t found inspiration in those movies.
If Gemma wasn’t real, why did she say “Hey, Elizabeth”?
This one is kind of questionable. So initially, we believe Gemma’s real, that she came over, stayed the night, but then Skye’s late the next morning and Elizabeth shows up to yell at her. Skye walks out of the room to get ready. The camera just lingers on Gemma and Elizabeth. That’s when Elizabeth awkwardly says “Hey”. But we eventually come to find out that Gemma was never there, that it was just the smile entity messing with Skye. So if Gemma was just the entity all along…that would mean Gemma wasn’t actually in the room with Elizabeth. So there’d be no reason for her to say hi. And Skye had already left the room. So what reason would the entity have to keep up the charade?
The purpose of that dialogue is to make the viewer think Gemma’s real, so we wouldn’t predict the twist. But the in-world logic for why it occurs starts to feel like a bit of a stretch. At the end of the day, it’s not that important or serious. It’s just one of those little thorns that the more detail-oriented viewer could get hung up on.
Did Joshua trash Skye’s dressing room?
No. And you know better than to ask.
Cast
- Skye Riley – Naomi Scott
- Elizabeth Riley – Rosemarie DeWitt
- Joshua – Miles Gutierrez-Riley
- Gemma – Dylan Gelula
- Lewis Fregoli – Lukas Gage
- Morris – Peter Jacobson
- Paul Hudson – Ray Nicholson
- Joel – Kyle Gallner
- Darius – Raúl Castillo
- Drew Barrymore – Herself
- Written by – Parker Finn
- Directed by – Parker Finn
Thanks for reading our Smile 2 analysis. If you have any additional questions or want to share thoughts, please leave a comment!
