SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Smile 2. If you haven’t seen the film yet, proceed at your own risk!
There are plenty of monster-centric horror movies that end with the protagonist and their friends and/or family successfully triumphing over evil… but writer/director Parker Finn’s Smile is not one of those movies. Not only is Sosie Bacon’s Rose driven over the edge in her battle against the grinning entity, but she passes on the curse by self-immolating in front of Kyle Gallner’s Joel. Smile has a shocking conclusion that you’d think would be hard to top, but that’s achieved in the sequel, as the Smile 2 ending is much bigger and totally bonkers.
Parker Finn makes great use of deception and perception in the new horror movie, and as such, you may find yourself asking a lot of questions. Fortunately, we have some answers for you, including commentary from the filmmaker himself about his approach to the ending in the critically acclaimed movie. Before we dig into consequences of everything, let’s first do a quick recap of what happens in Smile 2, which is now in theaters.
What Happens At The End Of Smile 2
In her last ditch effort to try and rid herself of the smiling demon, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) drives with Gemma (Dylan Gelula) to Staten Island so that they can meet Morris (Peter Jacobson) and test his hypothetical cure. There is a nice bit of terror experienced on the way, as Skye gets a phone call from the real Gemma, who says she hasn’t been in contact since Skye left her original voicemail, but the protagonist seems to temporarily banish the demon by asserting that she is in control.
She meets Morris and the two of them go into the freezer of a former Pizza Hut – the plan being for the ER nurse to administer medication that will temporarily kill Skye. After administering an injection, Morris mysteriously leaves and doesn’t come back… leaving Skye to discover her post-accident self hanging from the ceiling and staring down at her. The two of them fight, and there is a brief moment where it seems as though the pop star has won. But she hasn’t. The entity informs her that she is very much not in control.
Skye suddenly finds herself in full concert wardrobe emerging on stage in front of thousands of adoring fans. Her mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), Darius (Raúl Castillo) and Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) are all in the crowd – but nobody other than the protagonist can see her smiling doppelganger on stage with her. The true form of the demon emerges from inside the twin and as Skye goes down on her knees, it stretches her mouth and enters her.
Switching perspectives, the audience is silent and worried as Skye lies on the stage unconscious. When she gets back up, she raises her microphone and he witness the shocked reactions of the crowd as she proceeds to jam the device into her own eye socket.
What Is Real In Smile 2 And What Isn’t?
The physical presence of the entity in the Smile movies is terrifying all by itself, as it turns grins into nightmares, but what is far more threatening about the demon is its ability to manipulate the perceived reality of the individual it is cursing. Showing up at a target’s home wearing the skin of a person they care about is a party trick compared to its capacity to change how the cursed person sees the world.
Skye Riley gets a full dose of this in the third act of Smile 2. The fact that her mother is still alive at the concert at the very end makes one consider that everything that happens after she wakes up at the private wellness clinic is a fabrication by the entity. She was made to believe that her mom had been killed and that she threatened a lobby full of people with a gun before going on her drive to Staten Island. While that was all in her head, her body evidently continued on with the normal schedule and concert prep (with apparently nobody in Skye’s inner circle being aware that anything was wrong).
But if all that was fake… what else could possibly be fake? Can we even be sure that Morris is a real person? After a first viewing of Smile 2, those questions don’t have firm answers, but fans will certainly come up with theories after rewatches and frame-by-frame hunts for clues.
Smile 2’s Director Explains How The Ending Of The First Movie Had A Direct Impact On The Horror Sequel’s Shocking Conclusion
From a macro perspective, part of what makes the end of Smile 2 so fascinating is how much bigger it is than the aforementioned ending of Smile. In the first movie, the chain of trauma simply continues with Rose passing on the curse to Joel. In Skye’s case, she finds herself in a position where she unwillingly curses an entire arena full of people.
When I spoke with Parker Finn during the pre-release Los Angeles press day for Smile 2 earlier this month (as captured in the video above), I specifically asked about the two very different endings, and Finn explained how one led to the other. Said the filmmaker,
I felt like I wanted to do something that was both an echo of the first film and yet was sort of diametrically opposite and to be sort of on main stage. And what happens there, it felt so thematically in line with sort of this whole approach to celebrity and platforms that they have and the influence they have on people.
Continuing, Finn added that in addition to the Smile 2 ending echoing the ending of Smile, the way in which the finale is shot is meant to invoke the feeling of looking into a mirror. The film doesn’t show Skye jamming the microphone into her own skull, and sells the moment instead by having us watch the faces of horrified concert-goers while it happens. Discussing this visual, Finn said,
As well, there's obviously this sense of the audience at the end of the film sort of staring through the screen at the audience in the movie theater. And I wanted to sort of create this slightly meta element of like, 'Wait a second. Have we done this? In coming back for a sequel, am I somehow complicit in this whole situation?' That felt like a really interesting challenge to me, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out.
Scanning the crowd of terrified faces in the final moments of Smile 2 sets one’s imagination on fire as you wonder what it is that Skye is doing to herself… and that feeling continues when one thinks about the implications of the ending on the future of the franchise.
What Smile 2’s Ending Means For The Potential Future Of The Horror Franchise
The pattern of the entity in the Smile movies is relatively simple. It haunts a person for about a week until they have been driven to the edge of madness, and then it inhabits them. In front of a witness, it then has its new host commit suicide in exceptionally gory fashion, and the trauma experienced by the observer is akin to being infected. Then it all happens again.
But what if there isn’t just one observer, but instead thousands?
That’s a question without an answer right now, but it would presumably be the starting place for a Smile 3 (which, it should be noted, hasn’t been announced or said to be in development yet). The rules of the entity dictate that everyone in the arena who sees Skye commit suicide is going to experience the same kind of torment that she did, but can it actually do that? Is it now going to multiply? Or will it feed on all of the people at the concert one-by-one? With all the chains that this theoretically begins, is it the start of a world-ending event? There’s a lot that can be explored with a third movie, and we can keep fingers crossed that Parker Finn is cooking something up something that is just as special as his second film.
Smile 2 is now playing in theaters everywhere, and be sure to stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more of our feature and interview coverage of the new horror blockbuster. If you’re looking for more treats like the Smile franchise, check out our feature 9 Movies Like Smile And How To Watch Them.
