Smile 2, the recent sequel to Smile, a psychological supernatural horror film from writer and director Parker Finn, has taken the internet by storm. Perhaps it’s because of the way the movie handles themes of trauma, grief, and addiction. Maybe it’s because of Naomi Scott’s outstanding performance. Or it might just be all that and the fact that people are eager to understand how the evil entity at the center of this particular scary movie works.
Both movies center around innocent victims who are cursed by an evil power that somehow forces them to meet a horrible end. But how does the Smile curse work? How does this evil entity kill people? And will we see it return again?
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How does the Smile curse work?
There’s much we still don’t know about the Smile curse, but characters in both Smile and Smile 2 have uncovered some information that gives an idea about the infection and the pattern of behavior expected from the victims. In Smile 2, Morris (Peter Jacobson) tells Skye (Naomi Scott) that he has managed to trace it back through at least eight victims, including his brother.
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From what we know of the first movie, each victim of the Smile curse saw another person die in front of them. After that traumatic event, each of them became the new host of the curse. But how does that happen? The entity feeds on trauma, and presumably, the trauma from seeing a person die, often in gruesome ways, is enough for the entity to jump into a new host. The entity also seems to target people who already have trauma in their past. The first Smile made it seem like the curse required suicide, but Smile 2 makes it clear that the curse can transfer hosts after any death, as long as it’s traumatic.
That makes the trauma the crucial element for the curse. Once the Smile curse has taken over someone, it will operate like a parasite, feeding on that person’s trauma until the person is mentally broken. When they inevitably die – often by suicide, the curse will then pass onto a new host that has witnessed the death. Visually, the Smile entity looks like a tall, red, skinless, vaguely human-looking monster with many smiling mouths nested inside each other, and hosts only see the entity’s real form as it possesses them.
The timeline of both movies indicates that people afflicted by the Smile curse will typically die in under a week after the curse, though it’s not a set number of days as it depends on how long it takes the curse to break down a person’s mind.
Can the Smile curse be broken?
Both movies showcased ways to “break” the Smile curse, though ultimately there’s no real answer to this question. In the first Smile we learn of someone who managed to pass the curse to someone else, which isn’t the same as breaking it but it’s something. That person, convicted murderer Robert Talley, killed a person in front of a witness. The entity then moved from him to that witness.
In Smile 2, Morris theorizes that since the entity feeds on trauma, it would be destroyed if the host was killed in a way that was not related to the curse and had no new host to jump to. He proposed stopping Skye’s heart temporarily to this. It all seemed like a really good idea, it just never came to pass. Smile 2’s big twist reveals that most of what has transpired in the movie is a hallucination she’s seeing as the evil entity is taking over her mind. That means we never find out if the curse can really be broken, and the Smile curse is free to return for another scary movie.