Smile 2

The film opens in the aftermath of the first: Joel, the ex-cop who survived Rose's death, attempts to pass the Smile Entity to someone else before it kills him but fails to complete the transfer cleanly. The curse instead lands on a drug dealer named Lewis Fregoli. Skye Riley, a global pop star preparing for a massive world tour, witnesses Lewis's grotesque and involuntary self-destruction — and the Entity jumps to her.

Skye is already fractured before the curse arrives. A car accident killed her boyfriend and left her carrying guilt she has never processed. The tour preparations are grinding, the pressure from management and press relentless, and the people around her are primed to interpret any sign of instability as substance abuse or burnout. The Entity exploits all of this. The hallucinations begin immediately: people around her flashing an unnatural, locked rictus smile just before something terrible happens, time loss, reality slipping in ways she cannot verify or explain.

She tracks down Morris, an ER nurse who has been studying the Entity like a disease after losing his brother to it. Morris has constructed a theory of the curse from observation: the Entity is a parasitic force that feeds on trauma, inhabits a host, torments them with escalating hallucinations, and ultimately drives them to a spectacular, public, self-inflicted death in front of at least one witness — at which point it jumps to that witness. His proposed counter: kill the host in controlled isolation, with no witnesses present to receive the transfer, then resuscitate. Sever the parasite by denying it its mechanism.

The Entity, aware of the threat, begins running extended simulations directly inside her perception to prevent her from acting. In one sustained episode, she believes she has escaped a treatment facility alongside her friend Gemma, stolen a car, and is driving to Morris's location to attempt the procedure — a vivid, convincing sequence of events that collapses when the real Gemma calls her phone and she realizes the Gemma in the passenger seat has been the Entity the whole time. The film keeps the audience inside Skye's degraded perception throughout, making it impossible to be certain which events are real. The attempted procedure at Morris's location does not cleanly resolve the problem; the Entity is not simply defeated by the logic of science or willpower.