Smile 2 spends most of its runtime convincing you that Skye Riley is one step away from getting her life back. Naomi Scott plays her as brittle but determined, a pop star rebuilding after addiction, a fatal car crash, and the sort of public scrutiny that eats people alive. By the time the Smile Entity has her backed into a corner, it feels like the story is building toward one big, sacrificial decision that will finally break the curse.
The film absolutely delivers a big decision. It just twists the knife on what that choice actually achieves. To unpack Skye’s final moments, you have to look at three overlapping things: what she thinks she is choosing, what the Entity actually wants, and how the movie uses that gap to say something pretty nasty about fame, trauma, and us in the audience.
How the Curse Pins Skye Into a Corner
The sequel opens by reminding us that the curse has already moved on from Rose and Joel in the first film. Joel (Kyle Gallner), now infected, tries to pass the Entity on by killing a criminal in front of another, but the scene collapses into chaos and a bystander, Lewis (Lukas Gage), ends up as the new carrier before Joel dies in traffic.
From there, the movie shifts to Skye, a New York pop star in rehearsals for a huge comeback tour after a car crash that killed her actor boyfriend Paul (Ray Nicholson). She is already living inside a pressure cooker: a history of substance abuse, a body that hurts, and a controlling mother-manager, Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), who wants the tour to go ahead no matter what. When Skye sneaks out to score painkillers from Lewis, she walks straight into the Entity’s chain.
The Plan That Looks Like a Way Out
Skye’s supposed lifeline appears in the form of Morris (Peter Jacobson), an ER nurse who has been tracking the curse since it killed his brother. He tells her he believes there is one way out: if the infected person’s heart stops while they are alone, and then someone brings them back, the Entity will have nowhere to jump and will die with them, while the revived host walks away free.
Early tracking of the film’s discourse suggests this “parasite logic” clicked for a lot of viewers because it feels like a horror version of a medical reset button.
The Arena Twist
Of course, Smile 2 is not interested in letting that decision stand the way she intends. Just as Morris is about to begin, the lights cut out. The Entity appears, taunting her as a version of herself from the night of Paul’s crash. They wrestle, and Skye jams the syringe into her own arm, choosing the gamble. For a second, it looks like the classic horror-movie “hero sacrifices themselves to destroy the evil” moment.
The next moment, all of that falls apart. Skye opens her eyes and discovers she is not in a derelict restaurant at all. She is onstage at Herald Square Garden, in front of thousands of fans, with Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), Darius (Raúl Castillo), and a very-much-alive Elizabeth watching from the crowd. The whole day was a hallucination.
What Skye Really Chooses in That Final Stretch
So does Skye actually have a “final choice” at all, if the Entity has been one step ahead of her? On a literal level, once she is onstage, the answer is no. The creature possesses her and drives the final act of violence. There is no last-minute resistance, no hidden loophole where she manages to redirect the curse. She loses.
Her real choice happens a little earlier, when she decides to pursue Morris’s plan instead of letting the Entity push her into killing someone else. The curse works by cornering people until they either self-destruct or murder to save themselves. Skye refuses that second option. She never tries to engineer a situation where a stranger will witness a death she caused.
Fame, Guilt, and an Audience of Witnesses
Parker Finn has talked openly about wanting the ending to feel meta, almost like the arena crowd is staring through the camera at the people in the theater. The question underneath that image is uncomfortable: by showing up for another Smile movie where we know how the curse works, are we part of what destroys Skye Riley?
Inside the story, Skye’s death lands at the intersection of guilt and exploitation. She has finally confronted what happened in the car with Paul and admitted that she steered them into that crash, and has tried to repair things with Gemma. She has begged her mother to see her as something more than a product. Yet the system around her still wants a show, and the Entity uses that fact. Her final “performance” gives the curse the biggest audience it has ever had.
What This Ending Sets up for the Smile Universe
From a franchise point of view, Skye’s ending is a reset button in the worst possible direction. Earlier, the curse was a gruesome one-to-one chain: one witness, one new host. By killing Skye in front of thousands, the Entity potentially floods the world with candidates, which opens the door for a third film that deals with a much more public infestation.
Joel’s attempt to “hack” the rules at the start of Smile 2 shows that violence and clever timing are not enough. Morris survives with his theory untested in reality. Gemma and Joshua walk away as deeply traumatized survivors who have seen what this thing can do to a person and to a crowd. The post-credit audio of Skye’s distorted screams suggests she is now trapped inside the Entity, one voice among many, which gives the series an even more personal, haunting thread to pull on next time.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.