Whenever you have an origninal breakout hit in the horror genre it generally means you can expect at least about 8 sequels cashing in on the concept.
The latest to spawn a hoped-for franchise is writer/director Finn Parker’s followup to his smash 2022 debut feature, Smile (which made $200 million globally) and which he promises is “bigger, bolder, more off the rails, nastier and bloodier’ and ten times the impact of the first film.
That may be, but Smile 2, at a bloated running time of 2 hours and 7 minutes, is basically just following the template of the original which dealt with a metaphysical being inhabiting its victims in the form of a human with a haunting smile on their face, actually a curse passed on from one possessed individual to the next.
In Smile the key protagonist was a psychiatrist, Dr. Rose Cotter, played gamely by Sosi Bacon who in her quest to help her patients becomes traumatized by this entity and spends most of the film trying to convince people she is just not batshit crazy, that her visions and horrifying situation is not just a psychological problem but rather the real deal.
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