Naomi Scott in Smile 2
SMILE 2
Skye Riley, the heroine of writer/director Parker Finn's Smile 2, is a famed pop singer modeled after a certain international superstar, and because she's fronting a sequel in this particular horror series, she's prone to nightmarish hallucinations of grinning psychopaths. We consequently see plenty of Skye rehearsing for her comeback tour, but in one sequence, we also witness her backup dancers' transformation into a hideous, all-smiling mass of writing bodies in leotards, like what you'd get had Bob Fosse adapted Dante's Inferno. It was here that my heart truly went out to a certain sect of movie lovers. First M. Night Shymalan makes his chanteuse daughter a significant part of his thriller Trap, then Todd Phillips floods his Joker followup with songs, and now this. Is no genre safe from the global Swift-ification?
Perhaps not. (In addition to Broadway belting in the film version of Wicked, November will bring with it Emilia Pérez, a musical take on a foreign-language trans-comedy crime thriller – you know, that tired ol' genre.) But even though, as a fright flick, Smile 2 isn't that bad, it's the pop-star angle that provides the majority of pop. As Finn's 2022 predecessor demonstrated, it's scary enough when random strangers greet you with stares best left to Jack Nicholson in The Shining. (In a delightfully perverse touch, Nicholson's real-life son Ray shows up here as Skye's ex-boyfriend, and appears as capable as Dad at pulling off Malevolent Kubrick Face.) But what's a poor, world-famous celebrity to do when a manager's, or an assistant's, or a fan's expression of panicked glee is indistinguishable from a monster's? While Finn wastes little time placing Skye (Naomi Scott) in supernatural jeopardy, he also supplies the young diva with enough emotional and physical baggage – a high-pressure tour, recovering drug and alcohol addiction, lower-back pain that can only be managed with opioids she can't get prescribed – to suggest that she doesn't need a demonic presence to entirely fall apart. Having one around will simply expedite the process, and that gives this sequel an unusual and welcome foundation: tension built on preexisting tension.
How did Skye get in such a pickle? From the pickle Kyle Gallner's police officer Joel found himself in at the end of the first Smile. Having witnessed that film's climactic suicide and, as the rules of this franchise dictate, now facing his own impending demise within seven days of that traumatic sight, Joel opens this continuation with a plan: He'll kill himself in front of someone who deserves to inherit the curse of what I guess we're required to call the Smile Entity. (Apologies to the Smile-ignorant among you if all this sounds nonsensical – it plays easier than it reads.) His plan goes awry, though, and the curse is instead transferred to Lukas Gage's Lewis, a friendly drug dealer who happens to be the guy supplying Skye with Vicodin for her back pain. One thing leads to another, Lewis brutally kills himself in front of the horrified Skye, and before long, it seems that everyone in the gal's orbit is sporting unnaturally wide grins, as is one of the recently deceased.
All told, this is pretty fun stuff, though the setup does give Finn perhaps too wide a berth in terms of delivering shock effects. That creepy-ass rictus smile is a first-rate spine-tingler whether it's planted on the mug of a dancer or Nicholson's kid or that tyke with braces (a wonderfully voiceless Mila Falkof) so prominently featured in the advertising. Yet because hallucinations are also part of the Smile Entity package, there's really no rhyme or reason behind the freakouts; they can, and do, come out of nowhere, which is initially destabilizing but eventually merely tiresome. Numerous minutes-long sequences will transpire before we learn that said scenes were just taking place in Skye's head, and because we quickly glean that we can't trust anything we see, our emotional investment remains limited. A seemingly awful betrayal by a relative or friend, for instance, becomes a simple “Gotcha!” bit that leaves no residue, and Finn wildly overplays his reliance on blasts of deafening sound to punctuate the scares. Smile 2 is at its best, as in that scene with the wide-eyed young fan, when Finn lets the tension linger, and too much of his latest finds him playing to the cheap seats.
Naomi Scott, however, is playing on a purely gut level, and she's at all times spectacular. If you catch Smile 2 in its local presentation, you'll see Scott delivering one of those “Thanks for coming to the cineplex!” greetings that have been standard-issue since COVID, and it's the last time you'll hear the British talent speaking in her natural dialect; even her singing sounds unerringly American. (For what it's worth, even in rehearsal, Skye's touring production looks far more satisfying than Saleka Shymalan's.) But considering that Skye is required to be pitched almost beyond hysteria for most of the movie's two-plus hours, Scott is never too much for either her situations or our patience. She's a supremely empathetic presence who's also forceful as all get-out, and because flashbacks and tinkerings with reality are baked into her movie's DNA, we not only get Victim Skye, but also Wildly Drugged-Out Skye, Cracking Up in Public Skye, and Evil Doppelgänger Skye. Scott nails every incarnation, and the finale, too – though I was a tad disheartened that Finn's outing climaxed precisely the way I predicted it would well before entering the auditorium. It's still a good ending, though – really the only one it could have – and resonant enough to make genre fans shudder. Smile, too.
WE LIVE IN TIME
Whether they lead to the magnificence of Pulp Fiction or the sustained tension of Dunkirk or the gloriously cruel re-assessments of this summer's Strange Darling, intentionally fractured and jumbled chronologies can do a lot to sustain a movie. They can't, however, fundamentally redeem one. If their scenes were presented in chronological order, I'd argue that the aforementioned titles would still work quite nicely. Without the jumping-forward/leaping-back conceit of director John Crowley's and screenwriter Nick Payne's We Live in Time, there is no movie – or at least, not one that most would find worth watching.
That's not to say your time wouldn't be (largely) pleasantly spent. Were this a traditional narrative, it would open in London with Andrew Garfield's breakfast-food executive Tobias dejectedly attempting to sign his divorce papers, trekking out to pick up a functioning pen and a snack, and getting hit by a car belonging to Florence Pugh's fledgling restaurateur Almut Brühl. (Making this annoyingly unlikely Meet Cute all the Meet Cuter is that Tobias is in his bathrobe and slippers at the time.) She visits him at the hospital, they're sufficiently charmed with one another to go on a date, and in due time there's a passionate relationship, a baby. and Almut's cancer diagnosis. I hasten to add, however, that these are not spoilers, as Payne's gentle whisk through various time periods and haircuts ensures that we know about Almut's sickness – her second battle with cancer – and the couple's parenthood out of sequence, and within the film's first 15 minutes. Consequently, We Live in Time isn't about chronological memory so much as emotional memory – how the most devastating moments of your life can lead to some of your happiest reminiscences. It's a charming, completely workable notion for a big-screen romantic tearjerker, and would seem ideally suited to Payne, whose thrilling, Tony-nominated one-act Constellations also played fast and loose with presentational reality, allowing its lovestruck characters one do-over after another until they finally landed at their preordained, not-quite-happy ending.
In Constellations, though, the gimmick augmented the drama. Here, the gimmick is the drama. Pugh may be traditionally forthright and soulful, and Garfield may routinely fill his beseeching-puppy-dog eyes with tears, but their efforts can't disguise the fact that Almut and Tobias are fundamentally uncomplicated and uninteresting people. She's as singularly determined in her career goals as he is unmotivated about damned near everything but their love, and notwithstanding the adorable presence of Grace Delaney as their toddler, this thing really could've used a supporting cast; the few friends and family members we meet are nothing more than time-marking ciphers.
Barring the unfortunately sit-commy distractions – it's also not a spoiler to say that Almut, in an unwisely comedic scene, gives birth in the dirty restroom of a petrol station (!) – there was nothing I outright disliked about We Live in Time. (Or maybe there was, as Almut offers an “inspirational” gesture of professional self-sacrifice that seems mean-spirited toward her dutiful partner and contradicts everything we previously knew about the character.) But if Joker: Folie à Duex never gave us sufficient reason for it to be a musical, Crowley's offering never gives us a proper argument for why it's a whiplash-inducing feat of time travel – except, maybe, as a means of mitigating boredom.
WOMAN OF THE HOUR
Like We Live in Time, Anna Kendrick's directorial debut Woman of the Hour (newly streaming on Netflix) also leapfrogs between locales and time periods, but we keep returning to a very specific environment: the set of TV's long-running The Dating Game, where a plucky young wannabe actor (Kendrick's Cheryl Bradshaw) might choose a serial killer (Daniel Zovatto's Rodney Alcala) as her ideal match. Horrifying as it is to contemplate, this is a true story: In the midst of a 1970s murder spree during which he may have killed as many as 130 women (and was ultimately convicted for killing seven), Alcala was indeed a Dating Game contestant. But Kendrick's film, with its script by Ian McDonald, is about far more than the exploits of one psychopath, choosing to also address issues of widespread misogyny and terror that allowed such a fiend to thrive. It's a noble mission, and consequently disappointing, and potentially offensive, to say that Kendrick's movie succeeds most thoroughly when it's simply a taut, unsettling serial-killer flick and not a meditation on societal failings.
There's much to admire about Kendrick's take on her subject, beginning with her refusal to stage the pre- and post-Dating-Game murders with any degree of lurid titillation. (For the complete opposite approach, see either season of Ryan Murphy's Monster series involving Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers.) The killings are full-stop ugly – Alcala tended to revive his victims after initially strangling them, essentially killing them twice over – and cinematographer Zach Kuperstein in no way sensationalizes the images. Still, in order for this analysis of '70s norms (that continue to exist) to work, it requires that every male in sight be varying levels of the same sexist asshole, be it the casting agents who think Cheryl would be prettier if she didn't look so angry or the security guard who blows off a legitimate complaint, or even the smarmy Dating Game host (a one-dimensional but effective Tony Hale) visibly off-put by Cheryl's spotlight hogging. It seems as though we're meant to consider Alcala a day-to-day nightmare taken to the nth degree and beyond, which is fine as a thesis strategy, but leads to a rather one-note decimation. If, as the tired cliché goes, a good man is hard to find, finding one here is impossible, and McDonald's material would likely have been enriched by giving us even one example of a guy who wasn't inherently foolish, crude, demeaning, or homicidal.
That said, Kendrick demonstrates genuine filmmaking savvy all throughout Woman of the Hour, and her portrayal, unsurprisingly, is the finest of the bunch. For someone who spent much of her youth onstage (she was already Tony-nominated by age 12), Kendrick is an uncommonly subtle screen presence, and we sense Cheryl's rising and falling hopes in each of the actor's wary glances and tight-lipped smiles; Cheryl may be hungry, but she isn't heedless. It's topnotch work that never emits a whiff of vanity-project performance – not when Kendrick also proves so adept at the handling of drawn-out suspense and buried threat that becomes terrifyingly evident. Cheryl's increasingly rushed walk to her car after a disastrous date with Alcala is especially stomach-churning … and still not quite as frightening as the moment in which, seconds after she writes down a fake phone number, Alcala calls Cheryl's bluff and asks her to repeat the number back to him. We may not have expected a serial-killer thriller as Kendrick's directorial debut, but scenes such as this – and there are plenty of others – make the choice make an odd sort of sense. They're pitch perfect.
RUMOURS
In reading rave reviews for writer/directors Guy Maddin's, Evan Johnson's, and Galen Johnson's Canadian whatsit Rumours – RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico called it “consistently, cleverly entertaining,” while Vulture's Bilge Ebiri deemed it “the year's funniest movie” – I feel like I'm losing my mind.
I mean, I get the joke, if one exists, behind the political and economic masterminds of the global G7 forum finding themselves unable to deal with an actual crisis, which in this film entails mysterious abandonment in the woods, masturbating zombies, and a human brain the size of a Beluga whale. And if you're really desperate, I suppose you could find some mild chuckles in Cate Blanchett's Frau Blücher accent, Roy Dupuis' crybaby act as Canada's prime minister, and the elderly American president (Charles Dance, appropriately elderly but in no way American) needing to be hauled around in a wheelbarrow. But this grimly self-satisfied satire still caused my jaw to routinely drop – not by how audacious it was, but by how staggeringly unfunny it was. What in Heaven's name are this film's critical acolytes seeing that I'm not? I understand that Maddin is a purported legend (even though his name is unfamiliar to me), but Rumours suggests an ignoble first try by someone ill-equipped to handle a camera, let alone a feature showcasing two Oscars winners whose statuettes should be wilting from embarrassment.
With the overqualified, under-nurtured cast including Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Shōgun's Takehiro Hira, and Alicia Vikander (the latter, for good reason, looking unfailingly confused about her purpose), we're hauled from one meaningless, confounding set piece to the next, with the only apparent jokes being “Look at these G7 fools doing nothing while pretending to solve all our problems!” and “Look at the mindless minions jerking off to their nonsensical pronouncements!” The camera is always too close to the actors' faces for whatever comedy is intended to thrive, the gags are juvenile when they're not merely inscrutable, and even the title makes no earthly sense. Given that they're never addressed in the film, what are these supposed rumours with the “u”? Is that a nod to the Fleetwood Mac album and it's opening tune “I Don't Want to Know”? Aside from a splitting headache, all that Maddin's and the Johnsons' Rumours left me with were questions, and with this thing landing locally mere months after Borderlands, I suppose my biggest one is: What happened, Cate Blanchett?! Did losing that Oscar for TÁR irrevocably break your brain?!
