Smile 2 Ending Explained: Stage Fright

This article contains massive spoilers for "Smile 2." 

Although "trauma" became a buzzword that has recently invaded every press interview and social media post regarding a horror film, it's important to make the distinction that trauma lies at the very core of horror. In other words, every single horror movie, on some level, is about trauma. What writer/director Parker Finn cleverly did with his debut feature, 2022's "Smile," is make that implicit element explicit, crafting a horror movie where trauma itself is the villain.

Sure, the plot of the film involves a mysterious demon who is behind the horrific events, an entity that spreads itself through humanity by first spending a week or so destroying its victim's lives and their defenses, then possessing them and making them violently die by suicide in front of a witness, with that witness becoming the next infected host. It's a very J-Horror concept, combining elements of "Ring" and "Ju-On: The Grudge," the former being seen especially in the revelation that the only way to stop the Smile Entity is for a victim to pass it on to another person by violently murdering someone else in front of them. Yet, despite all this, it's clear that the first film is primarily about poor Rose (Sosie Bacon), a woman who dedicated her life to trying to assist others with their mental illnesses and trauma when she could not (or would not) face her own, and it was that unresolved trauma which she could no longer mask that eventually consumed her.

Through Rose's (and others') struggle with the Smile Entity, Finn was observing how keeping trauma repressed and masked does more harm than good and only allows such evil to self-perpetuate. Now, with his sequel "Smile 2," Finn tells a very similar story but with an ingeniously flipped script, centering the film around a pop star celebrity whose trauma is national news. In the film, as in real life, deep-seated issues are glossed over by fame and pop music, meaning that when that mask of cheer and happiness slips, it slips even harder.

"Smile 2" belongs to the proud tradition of horror sequels that pick up right from where the first film left off. In the first frame, we're reintroduced to Joel (Kyle Gallner), a New Jersey Detective who was Rose's ex-boyfriend and tried to help her combat the Smile Entity before it claimed Rose and had her incinerate herself in front of him. As a title card explains that it's "Six Days Later" after Joel's infection, Joel attacks a pair of criminal brothers in their suburban home, having used his police connections to discover that they were recently responsible for the murder of an innocent family but weren't convicted. Although Joel attempts to murder one brother in front of the other, a shootout ensues which leaves both brothers dead, and another man nearby as an unwitting witness: Lewis (Lukas Gage), a party drug dealer who was there trying to get some supplies.

Joel's mistake could be chalked up to mere bad luck, of course, but the circumstances make it feel like the Smile Entity isn't so easily tricked or appeased; it seems that it would rather feast on the souls of "good" people as opposed to unabashed criminals and murderers. There's something else afoot here, too, as Joel is shocked to see that what he thought would've been a meeting of just himself and the two brothers involves not only Lewis but the arrival of a bunch of other gangsters, too. In the chaos, Joel is killed by a passing vehicle while trying to escape, but it's not made clear whether Lewis witnessing the murder of the brother or Joel's own death is what passed the Smile Entity onto him, as we'll see later. All those other gangsters certainly could've witnessed Joel's death, so is it possible that his infection might've still been with him when he died, and it perhaps spread to not just Lewis, but several others? The film definitely wants to raise such questions and have us keep them in mind; they'll be raised again in the finale.

The protagonist (or "Final Girl," if you have a dark interpretation of that term) of "Smile 2" is Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a young pop star whose fame was already huge by the time her substance abuse issues were made public. This led to an incident where she and her boyfriend, the actor Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson), got into a nasty car accident that injured Skye and killed Paul. After a year of recovery, Skye is getting ready to launch a new album and a major world tour, beginning with an arena show in New York City. Her mother and manager, Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt) is all smiles as she tries to push her daughter to restart her career, launching a media campaign that begins with a tell-all interview on "The Drew Barrymore Show" (Barrymore's presence being a sly nod to her own horror history — not just "Scream," but films like "Firestarter," "Poison Ivy," and "Doppelganger," all movies about a violent force hidden inside a seemingly innocent girl).

Feeling the pressure that her family, friends, and fans are putting on her, her excruciating back pain from the accident, and her own hidden guilt — in a flashback, it's revealed that a drug-addled Skye deliberately ran herself and Paul off the road that fateful night — Skye insists on taking the edge off a little by contacting an old friend from high school who deals substances for some Vicodin. That friend, of course, is Lewis, who is taken over by the Smile Entity and bashes himself in the head to death with a bench press weight. From then on, Skye begins to be tormented by the demon, seeing various visions of Lewis and Paul as well as a creepy stalker of a fan (Iván Carlo). As circumstances and her nightmarish visions get more intense, Skye reconnects with her former best friend, Gemma (Dylan Gelula), whom she had a falling out with back before her accident.

All through this, Skye is attempting to deal with her trauma the way so many celebrities/artists do: by letting it fuel her work, taking things like the media discussing her life and putting them into songs entitled "Grieved You" and "Death of Me." However, soon even this form of empowerment through artistic expression isn't enough to deal with the mounting horror that the demon foists upon Skye.

Fortunately, there emerges a glimmer of hope for Skye as she's contacted by a mysterious man named Morris (Peter Jacobson). Initially believing his texts to be more hallucinations, Morris explains that he had initially tracked Lewis down and tried to help him, coming upon his corpse in his apartment and finding that Skye was the last person he'd texted, implying she'd had the curse passed onto her. During a meeting at a dive bar, Morris tells Skye about how his brother was in the chain of victims claimed by the entity, and ever since he's been conducting his own investigation into the phenomenon and trying to find a way for someone to not just skip their place in line (as the inmate that Rose met in the first "Smile" had) but to also eradicate the viral demon for good.

Morris, who either is an emergency room nurse or used to be one before his quest to battle the Smile Entity began, has deduced that the best way to stop the demon is to kill the last infected host before it can pass the entity on. This would involve stopping their heart and ceasing brain activity for somewhere around nine minutes before reviving them, in the hopes that the nine minutes of death would allow the demon to be dispelled forever. Since Skye flees her initial meeting with Morris due to being recognized by some zealous fans, she has no time to discuss this concept with him further while not under immediate duress. To say there are some lingering questions would be an understatement, but beyond obvious stuff like "Would a short death be enough to kill the thing, or will it just come back once the host has been revived?," there exist two big questions. Namely: what's to be done if not one, but multiple hosts exist? And is Morris telling the truth about himself? Can he be trusted? As we come to discover, the answer to those last two questions is, troublingly, "maybe."

A big part of the Smile Entity's modus operandi is a big part of the "Smile" series' M.O.: the ol' bait-and-switch. In most horror movies (or fairy tales, naturally) involving a character needing to overcome their own faults or mistakes before being able to defeat the Evil around them, self-actualization and willpower are enough to qualify for being saved. Not so in the "Smile" world; after all, even though poor Rose apologized to the ghost of her mother for her part in her death and then faced her own guilt over the matter as a result, it didn't stop the Entity (aka trauma) from tricking her into thinking all was well before taking her over completely. Sometimes, the wealth of trauma built up by a life poorly lived can be so great that there's no surpassing it.

This is the problem Skye faces as she continues to struggle with her inner and outer demons. Unfortunately, her focus is too much on what's right in front of her, not realizing until it's too late how much damage she (and the Entity) is doing to her career, her public image, and her loved ones. In addition to publicly humiliating Skye several times over, the hallucinations increase to a point where Skye is put into a private wellness clinic, with her mother (or perhaps a version of her mother) insisting that the tour continues on schedule despite Skye's obvious issues. After witnessing Elizabeth stab herself to death with a shard of broken mirror, Skye discovers that perhaps the hallucination masked the actual stabbing of her mother to death, with her holding the shard. Upon escaping the clinic (by holding the staff and others at gunpoint), Skye is rescued by Gemma, only to find out (much like Rose's experience with her therapist in the first film) that she and Gemma never actually reconnected, and their supposed reconciliation had been with a vision created by the Entity this whole time.

Still, Skye manages to make it on her own to a remote, abandoned Pizza Hut location where Morris has set up a system to hopefully temporarily kill and revive her. Once there, Morris is insistent on his plan, despite not filling Skye with a ton of confidence. It ends up being a moot point, however, for Morris mysteriously leaves the freezer room to go get something, allowing the manifestation of the Smile Entity to appear to Skye in the guise of post-crash Skye, all wounded and bloody. During their altercation, Skye appears to inject herself with the substance that Morris said would bring on her death, only for the entity to reveal that this did not occur. "Don't you get it? I am in control," it tells her, a rejoinder to an earlier moment when Skye insisted that she was the one in control of herself.

Skye calls out for Morris, but the man never returns, leading one to speculate that he, too, may have been a manifestation of the entity — but perhaps not just this scene's iteration of Morris. Perhaps Skye never actually met him at all. A few moments later, Skye suddenly finds herself inside the set piece that she'd been rehearsing in for the beginning of her concert, and the SkyeDemon tells her to "Break a leg" (a reference to another of Skye's crash-inflicted wounds). Skye emerges from the fake cocoon onto the stage of the arena, wearing the costume she refused to wear earlier, seeing the venue packed with thousands of screaming fans — including, most upsettingly, her mother, who's alive and well. This, of course, is a similar bait-and-switch that Finn pulled at the finale of the first "Smile," only where that sequence was reminiscent of the ending of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," this revelation calls a whole quarter of the movie's narrative into question, similar to Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street." Was Skye ever admitted into that wellness clinic? When did she ever rehearse or prep enough to allow for her tour to continue unhindered like this, and is this in spite of the public meltdowns she'd suffered, or had those been exaggerated by the entity, too? What is clear is that Skye's defenses are completely down, her spirit broken, her mind too confused to fight back. All that's left is the Trauma.

Stranded on stage in front of thousands of members of her adoring public, Skye is trapped and doomed — even her own mother innocuously mouths to her to smile, insisting she cover up all this pain and guilt and torment that she's been experiencing over the last week. Where Rose saw the Monstrosity (the physical manifestation of the entity, all bloody, muscular gristle surrounding a series of mouths) emerge from the source of her trauma, her late mother, Skye once again sees a version of herself, only it's a mirror image of herself, all glammed up for her first big song. This DemonSkye smiles as she exposes another part of Skye that she was literally trying to keep hidden: the scar from one of her wounds that travels vertically down her stomach. DemonSkye opens up this scar, allowing the Monstrosity to crawl out and force Skye's mouth open to let it in. In reality, the amassed crowd stares horrified as Skye appears to have a seizure on stage, but before anyone can alert authorities, Skye sits back up, apparently fine. She stands, a big, nasty smile plastered over her face.

One under-discussed aspect of artists is the way that they communicate themselves through their work. In most cases, a baring of their soul is fully intentional: the actor seeks to communicate their deepest emotions, the singer projects their thoughts and feelings through music, etc. However, there also exists the fact that artists have to sell themselves in order to gain and keep an audience, to remain successful in a fickle industry. Thus, actors can be typecast, celebrities only remain interesting as long as they're causing drama behind the scenes, and so on. When an artist is caught within their own public image, they can want to lash out at it: to shock, to upset, to stain, and even sometimes, to ruin. The final moment of "Smile 2" sees Skye Riley enact the ultimate version of this, doing something that's partially a cry for help and partially a rejoinder to everyone who doubted her, disrespected her, abandoned her, or simply never listened to her. She slams her microphone into her face repeatedly, ending up lodging it deep inside her head through her eye socket. This is witnessed by thousands of concert attendees, which means that all of these people have just shared a collective trauma, and also likely means that each one of them is now infected with the entity. (If there is a Morris, the poor guy has his work cut out for him now!) As for Skye, she is no longer, but there is a bitter irony to her fate, a sort of pyrrhic victory. To paraphrase KISS: they wanted the mess, so now they've got the rest.

"Smile 2" is in theaters everywhere.