Smile 2 ending explained: Does Skye does stop the curse?

One of the biggest unanswered questions leading into Smile 2 is what exactly is the demonic entity behind the curse? Although Parker Finn’s horror movie sequel doesn’t answer that question, the grisly ending does set up a potential threequel. 

Smile 2, out in UK cinemas now, is bigger and better than its predecessor. Starring Naomi Scott as Skye Riley, a pop star dealing with the trauma of a recent tragedy (and struggling with her sobriety) as she prepares for her comeback tour. 

This plays out in terrifying ways when the Smile curse is passed onto her, It Follows style. As the pressures pile on, her life begins to spiral, with the eerie entity ramping things up a notch and pushing Skye into a living nightmare.

All of this culminates in a jaw-dropping ending, which we’ve broken down below while also revealing the horror movie’s grisly deaths. Needless to say, spoilers ahead!

Does Skye stop the curse in Smile 2?

Skye doesn’t manage to stop the curse. Quite the opposite. At the end of Smile 2, the entity overpowers Skye while on stage and climbs into her skin. 

Once she’s fully possessed, a smile spreads across her face before she kills herself in brutal fashion (she shoves a microphone through her own head). 

Yes, that means the audience, including thousands of fans, Skye’s mom Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), and friend Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), have all been infected by the curse. That’s bad news for them, but great news for us as it sets up a pretty wild premsie for a hypothetical Smile 3.  

The Smile 2 ending doesn’t explain the curse

Now, in the Smile 2 trailer, it was teased that we might find out how to stop the demon without resorting to murder, but instead we’re left with more questions than answers. 

It certainly seems like a possibility earlier on in the new movie thanks to Morris (Peter Jacobson). After Lewis (Lukas Gage) passes on the curse to Skye, she starts receiving messages from an unknown number. At first they seem threatening, but then they later indicate they can help her. 

Eventually, she agrees to meet with the sender, who we learn is Morris, an ER nurse who believes he’s come up with a way to stop the entity after his brother fell victim to the curse. 

Paramount Pictures

Sadly, it’s not going to be easy. Morris believe the only way to stop the curse is to technically kill the host, in this case Skye, in a way that’s out of the entity’s control. 

Thanks to his experience in the medical field, Morris says he can stop her heart, killing her and thereby breaking the chain, before resuscitating her. 

When Skye first hears this, she thinks Morris is crazy and storms off. However, as the smiling demon intensifies its reign of terror, Skye spirals, culminating in a horrific event whereby she accidentally murders her mother (Editor’s Note: This will make sense later). 

At this stage, she’s being held at a wellness facility, and in order to escape, she holds everyone up at gunpoint before hijacking a car and driving to Morris.

She doesn’t want to hurt anyone else in her life, and decides to hit the f**k it button. Skye arrives at the destination, where Morris leads her into a makeshift operating room, which happens to be in an abandoned Pizza Hut’s walk-in fridge. 

Paramount Pictures

There’s method in Morris’s madness though as if Skye’s body temperature is lower, he can stop her heart for longer without damaging her brain, giving them more time to ensure the cycle is broken. 

But as he prepares her for the procedure, he leaves her alone on the operating table, at which point the demon takes the form of Skye herself right after the fatal crash that killed her ex boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson). 

With Morris nowhere to be seen, Skye plunges the needle into her neck, believing it’ll stop her heart before more damage is done. 

But in an almighty twist, the demon simply laughs and announces, “This isn’t real.” Skye looks over to her hand to find it’s empty. 

It then pushes her onto the stage, where she emerges to a crowd of screaming fans, including her mom (Ed’s note: Told you it would make sense). Yes, that’s right, Elizabeth is alive! Which begs the question: how much of this was real?

Was Morris really there at the start or did the demon just dream this up to give Skye false hope and torment her more? 

The theory of killing the host before the entity can certainly seems plausible in this context, but there are no clear cut answers at the end of Smile 2. Everything is open to interpretation. 

So, what exactly do we learn about the Smile curse?

Well, pretty much everything we knew from the first Smile movie – it’s an evil parasite that feeds on misery. 

It passes from one person to the next by taking over the host’s body, causing them to die by suicide. Whoever witnesses that suicide becomes the next host, and the chain continues. 

This is as far as we get in the first Smile, as the demon lulls Rose into a false sense of security, making her believe she’s ended it before taking her over. In the final scene, she kills herself, passing it onto Joel (Kyle Gallner). 

Prior to this, we find out there is a way to break the chain through Robert Talley, the sole exception in the chain of suicides. 

He’s locked up in prison for murder, having discovered that the only way to pass it on is for the infected to murder someone in front of another person. 

Robert also reveals there was another chain recorded in Brazil years prior. In Smile 2, Morris opens up about the chain prior to Skye, saying his brother was eight suicides before her. But, again, who knows? Maybe Morris was never even real. 

Is there a post-credits scene?

We’ll keep this one short and sweet: there is no post-credits scene in Smile 2. 

So, once the credits start rolling, you’re free to leave the theater if you wish. Or you can stay and listen to one of the tunes Scott performed for the movie, which is intercepted by some scary screaming. 

Smile 2 deaths explained

There are numerous deaths in Smile 2, all of them gruesome. They include Joel, Lewis, Morris’ brother, Paul, and Skye. We also see the brutal killing of Elizabeth, although given the ending, this was likely a hallucination. 

We’ll start with Joel, who dies at the very beginning of the new movie in what is arguably one of the most gruesome sequences. Smile 2 picks up not long after the events of the first flick, with Joel clearly suffering from the strain of the possession. 

He attempts to pass the curse on by murdering a criminal drug dealer in front of his boss, knowing both of them are terrible people. However, the incident goes wrong as Joel accidentally kills both of them. 

What’s more, he hadn’t realized that Lewis had been in the room the whole time and witnessed everything, meaning Joel’s just passed the curse onto an innocent victim. Before he has time to explain, a group of the drug dealer’s cronies turn up and start shooting at him. 

As he flees the house, he runs into the road and straight into oncoming traffic. A truck pulverizes him, leaving a trail of innards smeared across the road. 

Next up is poor Lewis, who Skye ends up visiting to get some Vicodin. Even though she’s in recovery from drug addiction, she needs something strong for her back, having been in a car accident a few months prior.

While there, she notices Lewis is spiraling. What she doesn’t know is that this is because of the curse. He disappears into another room before emerging with that uncanny grin across his face. 

Lewis grabs a nearby dumbbell weight and proceeds to smash it into his face. With each strike, his face grows progressively more messed up, until eventually pieces of flesh are falling off his jaw. Once he’s dead, the curse is passed onto Skye. 

When Skye first visits Morris, he describes how his brother died: by ripping his own jaw off with a crowbar. The screen flashes to show this moment in graphic detail, but this could all just be part of the hallucination. 

As Skye’s mental state descends, we also learn more about the crash, which left her ex boyfriend Paul dead. 

One of the most heart-wrenching scenes is the flashback to the moments after the crash, where Skye wakes up with her bone through her leg and blood all over her face. She looks over to see Paul is dead, causing her to scream. 

As for Elizabeth, her death is suitably gory. After Skye passes out, she wakes up in a wellness center, where she tries to plead with her mom to let her go. But she insists she remains there for the next day to rest before the tour starts. 

They get into a heated argument, before the demonic smile creeps across Elizabeth’s face. Using a broken shard of mirror, she starts stabbing herself in the face multiple times. 

When Skye tries to escape, she comes to and realizes she was the one holding the shard the whole time. However, as said, Elizabeth is in the crowd for the final scene, meaning this was all likely a facade dreamt up by the curse. 

The final death is Skye, which she carries out after being possessed by using a microphone to bash her own head in. Finn makes the smart decision for the death to happen off-screen, instead focusing the camera on the crowd’s horrified reaction. 

We do see the aftermath, though: the microphone has been shoved right through her brain. 

Will there be a Smile 3?

Although Paramount hasn’t given the greenlight for a Smile 3, Finn has teased the potential for the story to continue. 

After all, the Smile 2 ending not only sets up a threequel but paves the way for a Smile curse epidemic of sorts, given that thousands of people from the concert will now be infected. 

Paramount Pictures

When asked about more Smile movies by GamesRadar, the filmmaker said, “I think there are so many different, interesting directions the world of Smile can take, different roads it can go down. 

“Right now I’m very excited to see how audiences respond to Smile 2 and if we are lucky with how audiences can connect with and embrace the film, I think the sky’s the limit.”

Smile 2 drops in US cinemas on Friday, October 18. Be sure to check out which streaming platform it’ll land on first, as well as the Creepypasta to read beforehand. You can also take a look at the horror movies coming to streaming this month.