‘Smile 2’ ending explained: What’s real and what’s not in Naomi Scott’s nightmarish journey?

While 2022’s Smile was a hit, the movie’s ending betrays its message — about facing your traumas and working on your mental health — for the sake of one final scare. Smile 2 doesn’t have the same issue, as it focuses more on horror than grandiose themes. Yet, the ending of the sequel might still be confusing.

Spoiler warning: The following article contains spoilers for the ending of Smile and Smile 2.

Since Smile has already established the rules for how its supernatural entity works, Smile 2 doesn’t waste much time on it. To those needing a reminder, the evil lurking in the franchise’s shadows latches onto a traumatized victim. After that, the entity feeds on the victim’s emotional turmoil, wearing the faces of strangers and loved ones to conjure horrific images that slowly drain the host’s sanity. It takes around a week for this demon to break the host. Once it does, it gains full control of the host’s body and then commits suicide in front of a witness, who becomes the entity’s newly- traumatized target. Smile teased that confronting your past and working on your mental health could defeat the creature, but by its ending, there’s still no way out but suicide – an odd message, for sure.

The original movie determined that the only way to break the cycle is to commit murder in front of someone. The barbaric act of taking someone’s life and forcing another person to watch it passes the entity forward, releasing the current host. Smile 2 introduces another piece of the puzzle. In the sequel, Naomi Scott’s Skye Riley joins forces with Peter Jacobson’s Morris, the brother of a previous victim. Morris believes that killing Skye will also kill the parasite inside her, a sacrifice he can revert by reanimating the pop singer’s body. At first, Skye doesn’t want to risk it. However, after being psychologically tortured for days, Skye decides to follow Morris’ plan. Unfortunately, by then, it’s too late.

How much of what Skye sees in Smile 2 is an illusion?

After confronting the entity, Skye injects herself with a heart-stopping drug. She thinks she won, only to discover the creature has been altering her memories for so long that she’s actually on stage, during the opening concert of her new tour – the whole final battle is part of the illusion. At that moment, Skye loses all hope and gives in to the creature’s control. Once again, there’s no escaping the cycle.

The shocking reveal at the end of Smile 2 raises some questions about what’s true or not throughout the movie. So, let’s break everything down.

First of all, Skye’s mother is still alive. That means everything we see from the moment Skye wakes up in the hospital after suffering a concussion is an illusion. That includes Skye supposedly murdering her mother, escaping the hospital, meeting Morris, and then confronting the monster inside the refrigerator room. The whole race against time to kill the entity is nothing but fake memories fabricated to keep Skye busy while the creature guides her to the stage for her last performance.

In short, from the moment Skye is attacked in her apartment and hits her head on the piano, the entity changes her perception of the world around her, so the singer stays put until it’s time to appear on stage.

Things get more muddled when it comes to Gemma (Dylan Gelula). During the hospital escape scene, Skye finds out Gemma never called her back. So, every time she thought she met her stranded friend, that was a fake memory created by the entity. It makes sense, as no other character ever interacts with Gemma in Smile 2. However, the hospital escape was in itself an illusion, so we can’t trust anything that happened then — even the Gemma reveal.

There are two possibilities. It could be that Gemma truly forgave Skye, and the two spent some time together before the hospital escape, when the entity began to fully control Skye’s memory. Or Gemma never cared to reply to Skye’s desperate cry for help, and the entity was already fabricating every interaction with Gemma even before Skye suffered a concussion. Considering Gemma is not in the concert’s audience in the final scene, it’s most likely she never showed up for real during the movie’s entire runtime.

How does Smile 2 set up a threequel?

In Smile 2, the creature is determined to break Skye, speeding up the process of gaining full control over her body. As the entity puts it, it has been waiting for Skye for too long. That’s because the singer is a special kind of host, one with a huge audience.

Usually, the entity jumps from one host to another. There are usually only two people involved in the process: the one who kills themselves, and the other who watches. We never had to wonder what happens if multiple people witness a host’s final act.

However, the bloody suicide of Skye teases that the creature is capable of infecting multiple hosts at the same time. The creature has ensured Skye would take her life on stage in front of thousands of people, now all potential new hosts. So, since the entity was so excited about this opportunity, it has something to gain from a crowd of witnesses.

We don’t know much about Smile’s monster yet. Still, it’s fair to assume that one of two things happens when Skye shoves a microphone into her head. First, the creature could occupy multiple bodies simultaneously, feasting on the fractured psyches of thousands of victims. That would mean the entity is still unique, just extremely powerful. Another possibility is that having an audience is how the parasite reproduces, spawning many offspring or even copies of itself, each capable of kicking off its own cycle of trauma. Either option is terrifying, but both tease that writer and director Parker Finn is not done with this universe. Which makes sense, considering how the movie starts.

Smile 2 is a direct sequel of Smile, as Skye gets infected by her drug dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage). Lewis, in his turn, inherits the monster from Joel (Kyle Gallner), the police officer who ends up with the entity in the first movie. It’s clear Finn isn’t just making different stories set in the same universe, but moving forward the same storyline. Since Smile 2 hints at a way of killing the creature while also giving it the ultimate victory, we need a third movie to wrap everything up.