Smile 2
It’s hard to believe the current mainstream horror cinema for teenagers is giallo body horror, but with extremely detailed CGI and perhaps some practical effects too.
Yes, this could be directed by Dario Argento (Suspiria), or Nicholas Winding Refn (The Neon Demon), in their bad days. Vox Lux is better than this, though.
The effects are really extremely graphic and the shots hold still for a relatively long time, it’s unsettling all right. Hyper-real, the knob goes so much to eleven, so it gets progressively over the top. That’s why the best scene is the second-to-last shot, with the crowd reaction and the crunching sounds, but then they blow it with the final reaction shot. Oh well, a new sequel is demanded.
The plot is barebones when it exists, and trite when it does. Mostly focused on the inner mythos, it’s really not about anything important. It’s not that I don’t think Beyoncé/Maddona/Taylor Swift are in a high pressure environment and their mental health suffers, but it’s not in my top thousand issues to actually care about. And I feel B-list actors are not really the right people to talk about it.
As for acting, only the main character has any scenes to shine, but they are very one note, even the flashbacks require not much more than extreme suffering and despair.
This is the equivalent of a McDonald’s meal: extremely fulfilling in the moment, but paper-thin simulacra of the real deal, so it’s immediately forgettable.
Poor production artists researching countless pictures of blood and guts, they are the real heroes.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.