Smile 2

Two Million Miles

Smile 2
Directed by Parker Finn
USA/ Canada 2024
Paramount Pictures
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Some implied spoilers as to the endings of the Smile movies.

Well, once again Paramount Pictures is testing the water to see if their potential audience are ready to walk a million miles for one of their Smiles and, from what I can hear in the overwhelming furore of positive feedback, I suspect the box office will certainly support the idea that there’s a lot of worn shoe leather out there this weekend.

I liked the first film quite a bit but think it went a little off track towards the end. Smile 2, is a much better sequel and, although it has nothing as standout as the ‘head dangling’ moment from the first one, I think this one is a much more accomplished movie and it’s just well written and directed (both credits to Finn for that) and has an absolutely incredible lead performance by actress/singer/song writer Naomi Scott. In this she plays pop singer Skye Riley, about to open her comeback tour after her formally drug fuelled ‘bad gal of rock’ days ended with a car crash that scarred her and killed her famous boyfriend, one year prior to the events in this film. In this story she is accompanied by her mum, played really well by Rosemarie DeWitt, who really goes all out in a gory scene in the last quarter of the movie.

The now clean and sober Skye, it turns out, is not prescribed very strong drugs because of her past history of abuse but she’s in quite a lot of pain in her back still from where she was injured in the car wreck. So in order to perform all her dance choreography she has a drug dealer she calls on for really strong pain killers. However, said drug dealer, as we see from the opening sequence, has become host to the Smile demon, which was also the antagonist of the first film (although, now I think back to that early scene, I’m not quite sure how this particular guy got himself infected, truth be told).

Anyway, if you remember the first film (reviewed here), the demon will toy with a person, feeding off their negativity and fear for a number of days, before making them kill themselves in front of someone wearing the big rictus grin of the marketing campaigns for the two movies, thus passing the demon on to the next victim. So when Skye goes round to his apartment late one night to try and get some pain killers, he bashes himself repeatedly in the face, to death, with a weight from his personal gym and transfers the demon into her... something she is more than made aware of not long after the incident.

The rest of the film is basically Skye trying to do press tours and ready herself for her concert while trying to ward off the constant smile demons and hallucinations of violence and carnage hijacking her throughout... some of which might be real and some of which may not. And it’s ferocious and fast paced and, honestly, almost every shot (apart from the pre-credits sequence involving some drug dealers) features Naomi Scott expressing a huge amount of different and often quite wild and strenuous emotions... she’s nothing short of sensational in this role. I’m pretty sure this must have been a lot of hard work for her because it can be exhausting just watching the thing.

Acting aside, it’s also nicely directed and has some wonderful shot compositions and even some nice dance choreography for some of the scenes. Some nice scene transitions too... such as when she is in an elevator (well, over her in the UK they are called lifts) and the doors open and instead of it being the lobby of the building, it opens onto the next shot which is a birds eye view of her pulling up in a car at her next destination... so expedient but creative shot design is the name of the game here. Although, to be honest, I’m still not quite sure why a lot of moderns directors lately seem to want to turn the image upside down in various scenes. It’s almost become a bizarre trend now and there’s a lot of that kind of shot in this movie.

All this makes for a fast paced horror story (you won’t feel the two hours plus running time) and it also has another wonderful score by the composer of the first, Cristobal Tapia de Veer. Although, like the first, the studio has not seen fit to issue a proper, stand alone CD of said score so, yeah, I guess I won’t be able to listen to this one either.

I will comment on the ending here though. Like the first one, Smile 2 is unrelentingly grim and, if possible, even darker than the first one. The ending is somewhat similar in some ways and, I wish I could say I didn’t see it coming but there’s a big clue as to what the demon benefits from latching onto a multi-media singing sensation and the film takes us to that place... but it at least does so in a way which makes more logical sense than the first movie, which seemed to have a bleak ending just for the sake of bleakness. This one doesn’t do that and, in a way, sets up for a sequel which could be a very elevated version of the evil experiences in the first two movies. I won’t say too much more about that but the central logic of the premise is better served by the ending it gets here, for sure... although I can’t help but think that if a third movie is made, they might decide to ignore the ending of this one and do something different to save on potential budgetary requirements.

Suffice is to say, I thought Smile 2 was great and look forward to revisiting it again on Blu Ray at some point soon. If you liked the first one then you should have absolutely no problem with the second one and, if you didn’t... well this one is a more polished and well thought through movie so, maybe still give it a go.

The Girl With All The Gifts

Gift It Through The X-Shop

The Girl With All The Gifts
2016 UK/USA Directed by Colm McCarthy
UK cinema release print.

Wow. This is amazing. It’s rare that a movie quite lives up to the intrigue and power of the way the trailer for the release has been cut and, since The Girl With All The Gifts had such a wonderfully intriguing trailer, I was expecting something quite good from it, to be sure but... nowhere near the powerful cinematic experience that this film delivers on pretty much every level.

I’ll start of with what is becoming an increasingly frequent caveat in regards to a lot of book to film adaptations recently, to my shame. This film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by M. R. Carey and, alas, it’s not one I’ve read. I can’t, therefore, tell you how successful it is in terms of translating the source but I do know that, despite the novel and the screenplay being written kind of simultaneously (is my understanding of it), there are some elements from the book which didn’t make it into the movie and, also, the physical descriptions of some of the characters are way off.

That being said, and as I’ve mentioned many times before on here, movies aren’t books and adaptation from one format or another means making artistic choices which can benefit one medium at the expense of elements of the other and... this one is no different, I’m guessing.

What I do know for sure, and without giving away any spoilers, is that we have a British zombie movie which, while the writer and director disown the term ‘zombies’, instead going for the term ‘hungries’, is one of the best post-Romero zombie movies around and stands head and shoulders with other modern classics of ‘infected, zombie like’ creatures as the films in the [oREC] and 28 Later series. Whether the humans have died and come back or, in the case of some of these pseudo-zombie films, had their humanity and higher intelligence killed off by the virus to effectively create the same thing, is kind of a moot point in terms of this cultural phenomenon which started, as far as I can remember, in the early 19th Century.

The film introduces us to Melanie (played by Sennia Nanua) and, indeed, takes her viewpoint during the whole running time. She is one of a bunch of children who share the same... shall we say ‘eating habits’... as the ‘hungries’ that the last pockets of humanity are trying to keep at bay and find a cure for. I won’t give you the full history of how and why these children exist because it’s got a classic horror twist and it’s a nice moment when Doctor Cladwell (played by Glenn Close) reveals this history to Melanie. The film centres around the child, her adoration for her teacher Miss Justineau (played by Gemma Arteton) and her role within a group of survivors of an attack on their base camp including Caldwell, Justineau, Sgt. Eddie Parks (played by Paddy Considine) and Dillon (played by Anthony Welsh).

It’s very much a road movie as the small group try to find their way to some kind of safety and, all the while, with the exception of Miss Justineau, they are as much afraid of Melanie, as they are of the ‘hungries’ who they spend so much of their time trying to avoid contact with. Like most good zombie movies, and I don’t know if this is also true of the book, we never really know the details of the apocalyptic virus and how it first started but, having plunged us right into this world, the Doctor (and the writer) does have a good idea of the life cycle of the virus and, by the time we get to the last third of the movie, it becomes a key thing to understand the way the story evolves... not necessarily taking you to the place you’re kind of expecting it to in the same way you thought it would. Not quite, anyway... although the ending is quite familiar but also so much more than you would normally get from this kind of movie. It’s a good ‘un but, again, in the interests of not spoiling this for anybody... I’ll keep that to myself. I think John Wyndham would have loved this movie, though.

As you would expect from a film with a cast like this, there is some absolutely powerhouse acting going on. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for both Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine and, as you would expect, they totally knock it out of the park and are ably supported by Anthony Welsh. Glenn Close, on the other hand, is an actress I’ve never really liked all that much. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an absolutely incredible performer and you can’t fault her work... but she’s never really appealed to me. However, having said that, I think she’s got a real great role here which is perfect for her as a kind of ‘almost but not quite, depending on your moral point of view villain’ in the form of Dr. Caldwell and, yeah, she owns the role totally.

And then we have Sennia Nanua’s central performance as Melanie.

What can I say? I don’t know where they get some of these child actors from but some of them are amazing and, surrounded by some interesting and incredible child co-stars for certain scenes, Nanau manages to deliver an absolutely gobsmacking performance filled with all the subtlety and nuance that you might expect from someone three times her age (whatever that is, there seems to be no information present about that at time of writing this). Given that it’s a movie that someone her age presumably wouldn’t be allowed to legally see in this country, she does wonders here eating and biting her bloody way through various life forms and I can only applaud her performance whole heartedly.

Saying that, it’s not a very scary movie, at least in terms of the expected jump scares that a modern ‘horror film’ might be expected to supply. As far as I’m concerned, however, that just cements the link between this movie and the wealth of zombie movies which have come before. Aside from, maybe, the [oREC] series, which is genuinely scary for the first two outings, this takes its cue from the traditional zombie ‘survival horror’ strand of cinema and it does it very well... with a visceral suspense that slowly builds throughout the movie to its, really very satisfying, conclusion.

And then there’s the music. Oh, I wish there was a CD release of this thing already because the score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer is almost overwhelming in its power and raw beauty and, for a change, it’s been mixed right into the foreground so the movie gets an amazing lift of emotional, brain churning intensity. The opening sequence, for example, is very good but it really gets a sense of rising dread infused into it by the slowly building chanting and humming that plays out throughout certain passages of the movie, sometimes with metallic percussion at points. It’s really a magnificent work and it would be a major crime against filmanity, not to mention musicology, if this remains unreleased on CD. Hopefully some smart record label will try and pick this one up.

And that’s about it as far as The Girl With All The Gifts is concerned. An all round major achievement of intense suspense, zombie mayhem, some very sly and dark humour (the audience I was with were very appreciative of a certain line about whether Melanie would like a cat) and, right near the end, a moral question about the nature of a life form which, when finally answered, seals the fate of the world. An absolutely blistering and brilliant piece of cinematic art and absolutely one to run to as quickly as you can if you’re a fan of zombie movies. A real gem which I will be telling everyone about.