After weeks of teasing, Paramount Pictures has finally dropped it’s first trailer for Smile 2. In the previous teasers, we saw promo work highlighting the lead as if she were a real-life pop star. Crew and management talked about how Skye Riley was going to change music forever. There were even clips released of Naomi Scott’s Skye performing on stage with backup dancers and a crowded stadium. Now, thanks to the official trailer, we get to meet Skye Riley and take a glimpse at the horrors she’s set to face.
The first Smile movie was an unexpected hit. It told the story of a psychiatrist who witnesses a bizarre death that shakes her. But it also ties her to terrifying entity that is killing people, one smile at a time. It had a $17 million budget and made $216 million globally. Smile 2 has an obvious bigger budget that is hoping to do as well as the original. And honestly, the teaser trailer looks promising, not only because of Scott, but because of the simmering terror lurking underneath.
Throughout the teaser trailer we get to see Skye encounter terrors such as a her friend (Lukas Gage) killing himself in front of her, people smiling creepily at her in the hallway and during banquet dinners, and even a growing mob of people chasing her down a hallway like something straight out of a zombie movie. And the more that Skye experiences, the more you realize that she’s unraveling, heightening the tension of the movie. Even that little girl at the end with her frozen smile and dead eyes, that’s the slow terror that horror has been missing while they lean into jump scare after jump scare.
The one hope we do have is that Smile 2 finds a seamless way to tie into Smile without forgetting where it came from. Oftentimes sequels go for flash and bang instead of remembering the lore that brought them there and what people liked in the first place; the terror, the characters, and the simplicity of the story. And there’s hope in the fact that eagle eyed fans spotted Kyle Gallner’s Joel from the first Smile running away from a house and looking scared. But the car that closed off the teaser trailer points at him just being there to pass the baton on the evil following them all.
Watch the trailer below:
Smile 2 hits theaters on October 18th.
