Let's make this simple: You want to know if there are any post- or mid-credits scenes in Smile 2. The answer is no. Like the original, we cut to the credits on a big moment and writer/director Parker Finn lets that moment speak (and smile) for itself.
Full spoilers follow!
Smile 2 picks up right where the first movie left off. Well, six days later to be precise. As we learned in the first movie, those with this franchise’s curse can save themselves if they kill someone in front of a witness before the curse instead forces them to kill themself in the presence of another. And so police officer Joel (Kyle Gallner, the one actor back from the original) attempts to pass the curse to a known dangerous criminal by murdering that guy’s equally odious brother in front of him. But it all goes horribly wrong, and within minutes the intended witness is dead after Joel fires back at him when he’s shot at, and then Joel is dead as well, hit by a car as he tries to flee. But the curse has passed to a second witness Joel didn’t even realize was there initially – drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage).
It’s Lewis who then ends up passing the curse to pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) when she goes to buy vicodin from him one week later and he kills himself in front of her. Skye is already in a bad place when we meet her; her need for unprescribed vicodin is thanks to ongoing back pain she suffers from due to a terrible car accident from a year before that left her boyfriend (Ray Nicholson) dead. Plus, her longtime drug addiction from before the accident was revealed to the world. Her accompanying self-destructive, angry behavior also ruined her relationship with her best friend, Gemma (Dylan Gelula). Vicodin aside, Skye’s quit those other drugs but is still haunted by what occurred and, suffice to say, the curse is not going to help her feel better. She begins to see scary, intense and increasingly prolonged and believable visions, as the clock winds down on the week she has before she will be forced to kill herself.
Smile 2 Ending Explained
Smile 2’s last act takes some wild turns, leading into a final scene that is very memorable but also raises a lot of questions about what exactly transpired leading up to it.
At one point, terrified of a vision of all of her backup dancers inside her apartment, swarming and attacking her with the same haunting smile, Skye hits her head. She wakes up in a hospital with her mother/manager, Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt) by her side, telling her she suffered a concussion. However, Elizabeth also reveals she intends for Skye to still begin her planned tour the next night, insisting her daughter has burnt up too much good will and will ruin her career otherwise. Skye wants nothing to do with the tour but their argument is halted when Elizabeth begins smiling creepily, smashes a mirror and proceeds to slice herself up with a piece of the glass, including stabbing herself in the eye. Skye begins to run from the room only to look down and see she is the one holding a bloody, broken shard of the mirror – and sees her mother dead, seemingly killed by Skye herself.
Panicked, Skye makes a run for it. When she’s intercepted in the lobby, and people believe the blood she’s covered in is hers, she manages to feign injury in order to grab a security guard’s gun, holding everyone off. On the street, she runs into Gemma, who she’d reconciled with earlier in the film. Gemma, not knowing the situation but seeing Skye’s insistence, impulsively decides to help her flee, with Skye taking someone’s car at gunpoint.
In the car, Skye contacts Morris (Peter Jacobson), an ER nurse who had previously reached out to her, having discovered she was suffering the same curse his brother had died from. Morris thinks a way to permanently stop the curse and the entity behind it is for Skye to die before the entity can cause her death. He believes that even if her death is a brief one, before Morris medically resuscitates her, the entity will be left without a host during that time and Skye will be saved and no one else will be cursed. As Gemma drives them from Manhattan to Staten Island to meet Morris, Skye is shocked to see a phone call from… Gemma.
Similar to what happened in the first movie with that film’s protagonist, Rose, and her psychiatrist, Skye realizes the real Gemma is not with her in the car. The real Gemma in fact tells Skye she hasn’t seen her at all this week, and the entire reconciliation we saw them have wasn’t real. In fact, Skye is the one driving the car, nearly crashing it.
At an old, abandoned Pizza Hut, Morris has prepared for Skye’s “death” in a large freezer, intending to use the cold to fend off brain death to keep her technically dead longer to give them more time for the entity to leave. He has a syringe ready to inject her to stop her heart, but when Morris steps away before they begin, Skye is attacked by a vision of herself, appearing bloody and injured like she did in the aftermath of the car crash. As she fights her doppelganger, Skye grabs the syringe and injects herself in the neck, believing she has beaten the entity – except suddenly she’s not even holding the syringe, as the doppelganger mocks her, saying she has no real control.
Take a Bow
Everything changes around Skye, who finds herself dressed in her stage outfit inside the pod she was rehearsing with earlier to begin her concert. She stumbles out of the pod and she’s now onstage at the arena, with a huge, sold-out crowd cheering for her. Amongst the audience is Elizabeth, looking unharmed.
The confused Skye then sees herself again, now standing across from her onstage, this time dressed identically as she is in her concert outfit. The doppelganger lifts her shirt, revealing the huge scar from the car accident that Skye has on her stomach – and then tears the scar open with her hands, as a different version of the massive Monstrosity form Rose saw of the entity in the first movie before she died rips out of the doppelganger and stomps over to a petrified Skye. It pulls her mouth open, horrifically wide.
And then we see, in what now firmly appears to be the real world, Skye has collapsed on stage, as the crowd gasps with concern. She stumbles to her feet and stands up straight, with her back to the crowd, and everyone cheers what they assume is a quick recovery, until she slowly turns and reveals the inhuman smile on her face.
We then watch the crowd’s aghast reaction as we hear the noise of whatever Skye is doing and its accompanying thumps and squishes – and then see she has hammered her microphone straight into her eye, as she drops dead on the stage with the smile still upon her lips.
Does Smile 2 Set Up Smile 3?
It sure does, in that not only is the entity still an ongoing threat, but Skye just killed herself in front of thousands of people. That leaves plenty of possibilities for who the curse could be inside next, including established characters in Smile 2 like Elizabeth, music exec Darius (Raúl Castillo), or Skye’s assistant, Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), along with so many unnamed fans, backup dancers, and crew. Any of them could be the entity’s next host…
…unless it’s all of them? Going back to the first film’s release, Parker Finn has been coy when asked in interviews whether more than one witness could carry the curse, but the ending of Smile 2 basically demands that question be answered in a potential Smile 3. Could we see thousands of people now simultaneously “infected,” spreading the curse out more and more?
But What the Hell Actually Happened?
The reveal of Skye on stage raises a lot of questions about how much of the movie up until then truly happened. If Elizabeth is in fact alive and Skye performed her concert, then it doesn’t make sense that Skye ever fled the hospital and went to see Morris in Staten Island. But that also means it was during this prolonged, multi-scene, curse-caused vision that Skye spoke to Gemma and found out they’d never seen each other that week. So does that mean the real Gemma did come over to see Skye earlier in the film? And did Skye meet Morris at all during the earlier scene where he explains what’s happening to her? Is Morris even a real person?
The answer to those questions is probably yes. That’s because it feels like the easiest place that the split occurred, sending Skye into her prolonged vision, was when she was arguing with Elizabeth in the hospital and saw her mom begin to smile. It feels like the most likely scenario is that, in actuality, this argument led to Skye acquiescing. She agreed to do the show the next night (likely basically sleepwalking through it all, since the entity was now so in control of her), walked out on stage and then we saw how things ended for her.
We’ll soon learn if Finn clarifies some of that as inevitable spoiler interviews begin to come out. But given it makes sense to presume Morris was real and did have that first conversation with Skye, it also means he could probably continue to be an important character moving forward – and maybe even try out his plan for real with someone suffering from the curse, whether in an old Pizza Hut or not.
Does Smile 2 Have a Post-Credits Scene?
As noted, there are no post-credits or mid-credits scenes in the film. Though the closing credits do find Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s terrific score going into a surreal, experimental place, overlaying music with sounds of screaming and agony, invoking the feeling that the movie’s events are bleeding into the music.
What did you think of Smile 2? Let’s discuss in the comments!
Note: This story was updated on Oct. 18, 2024, with full spoilers from Smile 2.
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