Warning: This article contains spoilers for Trap and Smile 2.
Six decades after Beatlemania, pop stars still rule the world. Their grip over the public imagination has never really slackened, even as the definition of pop has morphed and mutated like TLC forming from T-1000 liquid goop in their most iconic music video. Still, if pop stardom is a constant, it’s loomed especially large over the culture of late. There’s the unfathomably wide devotion to Taylor Swift, a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, a pop star to end all pop stars. There’s also the way social media has turned standom into an inescapably public spectacle. Pop is everywhere, the air we breathe. Brat summer? Try Brat century.
If one needed further proof that we’re all living in the shadow of jukebox divas, just look at how horror — a genre with one bony finger forever curled around the zeitgeist — has begun to reflect our mass love affair with glittering songbirds. Two of this year’s most high-profile thrillers have moonwalked into the arena of pop stardom, building stories around the supernova celebrity of a music biz giantess. First we got Trap, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, in which a serial killer finds himself evading arrest at the concert of his teen daughter’s favorite artist … who then becomes directly involved in the plot once Josh Harnett’s The Butcher essentially turns her limo into a getaway car. And this weekend brings Smile 2, a sequel in which the trauma phantom of the original latches onto the fragile psyche of a tabloid fixation just as she’s preparing to mount a big, global comeback tour.
Of these scream machines, Trap is at once more affectionate and less specific in its exploration of the rarefied world of pop obsession. Shyamalan doesn’t condescend one bit to the adoration teen music lovers have for stars like Lady Raven, the fictional singer whose show becomes the backdrop for a game of cat-and-mouse. Shyamalan, after all, is the father of daughters who very well may have loved that kind of music as young women — including Saleka, who grew up to be a musician, and in fact plays Lady Raven in Trap and performs her sultry slow jams.
The movie takes a dazed, but never judgmental view of this milieu. It’s easy to project Shyamalan onto Harnett’s Cooper, at least before the character shows his true colors: Trap looks like a movie about pop music from a tourist to that scene — a supportive chaperone taking it all in without ever trying to get his head around why the music speaks to so many. At the same time, you do have to wonder if Shyamalan has ever actually attended a pop concert. He gets so many details about the experience hilariously wrong, from how the Lady Raven show takes place during the middle of the day to the fact that large groups of people are just wandering around the arena during the performance. The moment that really casts his grasp on pop mania under suspicion is where Cooper’s daughter seems completely unfazed to be missing parts of the show… including the start of her favorite song!
Shyamalan clearly loves his kid, that much is clear. He stops the movie cold to depict her performing. (Lady Raven, as far as we can see, specializes in sensual club bangers of the Ariana Grande variety.) He also ends up affording her a rather significant acting showcase, hinging the events of Trap’s second half upon her battle of wits with The Butcher. His affection results in a portrait of pop stardom that flatters the daydreams of fans everywhere: What if your No. 1 artist was down to earth, kind and patient with her devotees, and willing to risk her life to bring down a notorious serial killer? Talk about an unproblematic fave!
Smile 2 offers a less rosy perspective on pop stardom, in no small part because it unfolds from the perspective of the star. If Lady Raven, as Trap suggests, is the picture of celebrity without scandal and controversy, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is a trainwreck trying to get her life and career back on track. There are dozens of real-life antecedents for the rocky backstory writer-director Parker Finn lays out for his heroine: a yearlong binge of drugs and alcohol that ended with a car accident that claimed the life of her movie-star boyfriend and left her to grapple with physical and mental scars over a very long recovery period.
If Trap sometimes plays like if a serial killer wandered into one of those squeaky-clean, tour-diary concert films (think Katy Perry: Part of Me meets Dexter), Smile 2 is like a haunted version of the warts-and-all biopic they’d make about a star who lived too hard and died too young. Finn stays focused almost exclusively on the anxieties and headaches of Skye’s profession: the taxing video shoots, the hounding eyes of the paparazzi, the talk-show atonement rounds, the constant performing for a record-label honcho, the helicopter surveillance of a momanger.
Scott, who also performs her own music in the movie, isn’t mirroring any one real-life musician in particular. (She looks a little like Katy Perry, sounds a little like Dua Lipa, has struggles that might remind you a little of Amy Winehouse.) Smile 2 is after a more general portrait of pop stardom as a panic attack waiting to happen. It says that the music industry can be a horror movie even without a shape-shifting demon coaxing you toward a grisly faux-suicide.
The music celeb angle is easily the most interesting aspect of Smile 2, which isn’t nearly as scary as its predecessor, but gets some mileage out of shifting to the behind-the-scenes bubble of a struggling superstar. The movie honestly could have leaned harder into those elements, getting more nitty-gritty about the particulars of navigating fame in the very intrusive 21st century. It’s no accident that the best scenes in the movie involve Skye’s uneasy relationship with her fans. An early meet-and-greet sequence asks what’s scarier: a smiling demon child or a smiling grown man whose devotion creeps into outright stalking? Later, Finn stages a great set piece that confronts Skye with a staring, dancing flash mob of phantom fans, violating her privacy with unblinking demonic grins plastered on their faces.
It’s the focus on the relationship to a teeming fan base that really distinguishes these two pop-minded thrillers that are similar only in music-world scaffolding. Trap ends up looking on the bright side of stars building social media empires and influencing an army of followers. Late in the movie, Lady Raven mobilizes her loyalists to save the life of The Butcher’s latest victim; it’s like a detective-thriller abstraction of the way someone like Taylor Swift can drive voter turnout (or, less hearteningly, sic a bunch of keyboard warriors on a disapproving journalist).
But in Smile 2, a parasocial relationship with celebrity has much graver consequences. Without spoiling an ending that’s rather easy to see coming, let’s just say that there’s a danger to linking your own sense of self and well-being to the identity of a stranger flailing hard on a very public stage. At what point does pop’s grip on the world become a noose tightening around our necks?
Smile 2 is now playing in theaters everywhere. Trap is available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.