Year : 2024
Director/Screenwriter: Parker Finn
Country: United States (Paramount Pictures)
Director of Photography: Charlie Sarroff (returning from Smile 1)
Steadicam operator: Peter Vietro-Hannum
Camera Operator A: Dan Sharnoff
Editor: Elliot Greenberg
Music: Cristobal Tapia de Veer
Camera: ARRI Alexa 65 (Open Gate 6.5K)
Sequence duration: ~5 to 7 minutes
Method: apparent continuous shot written in the script as "a single unbroken shot"; possibly assembled from multiple takes (DCFilmdom: "possibly stitched")
Actors in the sequence: Kyle Gallner (Joel - returning from the first film), Lukas Gage (Lewis Fregoli)
Budget: $28 million
Box office: $138.1 million (×5 the budget)
Six days after the end of the first Smile. Night. Snow. Joel (Kyle Gallner), the ex-cop who witnessed Rose self-immolate, is at his wit's end, consumed by the entity's curse. He has a plan: to force the curse's transfer by killing someone in front of a witness. He parks in front of a house. Grabs a man in the driveway at gunpoint. Drags him inside. The camera follows. No wide shot of the street, no suspenseful music, no introductory montage; it's glued to Joel, shot on Steadicam, from the very first second. Joel enters the living room. A second drug dealer is sitting on the couch. The situation escalates instantly: the dealer pulls out a gun, a shootout erupts, and both men fall. Joel has killed them both; his plan has failed. Then he sees Lewis (Lukas Gage), a small-time, insignificant dealer, hiding in a corner, who saw everything. The entity has just passed through Lewis. Joel whispers "I'm sorry," runs out, and is struck head-on by a pickup truck. His body is dragged across the snowy pavement, leaving a long trail of blood that forms a smile. The camera didn't cut once.
Why this scene is iconic
Finn explained to GamesRadar: "In the script itself, I wrote that it would be one uninterrupted shot because I knew it would create this incredibly tense, suffocating feeling the moment you're thrown into the opening." The key word is "suffocating"—that's exactly the effect. By refusing to cut, Finn denies you the micro-pauses that horror editing normally offers between each moment of terror. The classic jump scare works through the contrast between calm and shock: cut to an empty hallway, cut to the monster. Here, there are no cuts. No empty hallway between two shocks. Joel enters the house, and from that moment on, the horror piles up relentlessly: the knife, the gunfight, the bodies, Lewis terrified, the chase down the street, the truck, the trail of blood.
DCFilmdom noted that the opening shot "lasts a good five to seven minutes and exemplifies the depth with which Finn and cinematographer Charlie Sarroff want to immerse you in this carnival of horror, often relying on long takes to keep us uneasy without the respite of a cut to another angle." This is the philosophy of the entire film, not just the prologue. Sarroff and Finn use long takes throughout Smile 2 to prevent the viewer from catching their breath.
The other reason this scene is iconic: it resolves the plot of the first film in five minutes. Joel, the character left hanging at the end of Smile (2022), dies in the prologue of Smile 2. His ingenious plan to transfer the curse (killing one criminal in front of another) fails because of an unforeseen variable (Lewis, lurking in the corner). And his death, struck by a truck and dragged across the snow in the shape of a smile, is both brutally absurd and narratively perfect. The continuous shot makes this death inevitable: there is no cut between the plan's failure and the fatal consequence. Both are the same continuous event.
How they filmed it
Sarroff described the visual philosophy of Smile 2 in ASC Magazine: "With Smile, we didn't necessarily want to lean into that much darkness. Parker and I wanted to push the film into a different space only if we could push ourselves." The film's main camera is an ARRI Alexa 65 with Open Gate 6.5K, a massive sensor that captures an amount of detail and depth of field unusual for a horror film. The choice was deliberate: Sarroff wanted every corner of the frame to be sharp and visible, so that horrors could emerge from anywhere, not just the center of the shot.
Peter Vietro-Hannum operated the Steadicam, and Dan Sharnoff was the A-camera operator. For the prologue, the Steadicam is the primary tool; it stays close to Joel in the driveway, enters the house with him, rotates in the living room during the shootout, follows Joel outside, and captures the truck that hits him. The sequence—exterior → interior → living room → exterior → street—transitions through spaces with radically different lighting (snowy night → neon interior → night street with truck headlights), requiring real-time exposure management without the possibility of cutting to adjust.
Finn confirmed that the scene was "a major challenge to prepare and shoot" but did not reveal the number of takes or the exact preparation time. DCFilmdom noted that the shot is "possibly stitched together from multiple takes," making it a composite shot rather than a true continuous shot, with seams hidden in the rapid camera movements (Joel's run, the indoor-outdoor transition).
Sarroff and Finn developed a specific visual language for Smile 2: wide-angle shots for the horror moments (the entity is everywhere in the frame), combined with a color palette dominated by reds, silvers, and blues, designed with production designer Lester Cohen. The prologue uses cold tones (night, snow, neon) that contrast sharply with the reds of the blood, making the smile-shaped trail of blood on the white snow the most graphically striking image in the film.
What to observe when reviewing it
Lewis in the Corner (~after the shooting) When Joel kills the two drug dealers, the camera stays on him; you don't see Lewis immediately. Then Joel turns his head, and the camera follows his gaze: Lewis is there, frozen, in a corner of the living room. This moment, the discovery of a witness no one had anticipated, is the pivot of the entire film. Without Lewis, the curse dies with the dealers. With Lewis, it will reach Skye Riley.
Joel's "I'm sorry" (just before the truck): Joel realizes that Lewis has just inherited the curse by accident. He murmurs an apology. Then he runs out and dies. Those are his last words. And the camera doesn't cut between the apology and the death because there is no distance between guilt and consequence.
The blood trail in the shape of a smile (end of shot) Joel's body is dragged across the snow by the truck. The blood forms a smile on the pavement. It's the entity's signature, visible from the outside, as if the curse is mocking everyone. And the continuous shot makes this image the last thing you see before the film truly begins.
Did you know that?
Finn wrote the long take directly into the script, not as a production note or directing instruction, but as a narrative element: "In the script itself, I wrote that it would be one uninterrupted shot." This is rare; most of the long takes in this collection are directing decisions made during pre-production or filming (Coogler on Creed, Hargrave on Extraction, Fukunaga on True Detective). Finn knew, from the writing stage, that the prologue had to be intense.
This shot is the first opening sequence shot of a horror film in this collection , and it uses the continuous shot in a way specific to the genre. In action films (Extraction, Atomic Blonde), the continuous shot creates exhaustion. In war films (Children of Men, The Revenant), it creates immersion in chaos. In horror, the continuous shot eliminates the fundamental mechanism of fear in cinema: the jump scare. The jump scare relies on the CUT: empty shot → CUT → monster. Without a cut, no jump scare is possible. What remains is worse: a continuous terror, without peak, without release, that builds for 5 to 7 minutes without your brain having a chance to reset.
Kyle Gallner, who plays Joel, has developed a reputation as a "scream king" of contemporary horror cinema (Smile, A Haunting in Venice, Strange Darling). His death in the prologue of Smile 2, struck by a truck in a single take and dragged across the snow in the shape of a smile, is his most spectacular exit. And the fact that it happens in a single shot, without cuts or editing, makes it irreversible, just like Noah's film (Irreversible, 2002, also in this collection), where the camera remains motionless for nine minutes. Two films, two different functions of the refusal to cut: Noah punishes you. Finn suffocates you.
Sources
Parker Finn - GamesRadar, "Smile 2 Director Discusses Opening Scene" (October 2024)
Parker Finn - LADBible, "Smile 2 Fans Still Thinking About Incredibly Brutal Opening Scene Filmed in One Shot" (October 2024)
Charlie Sarroff - ASC Magazine (American Society of Cinematographers), "Smile 2: Lighting a Pop Star's Nightmare" (October 2024)
Charlie Sarroff - The Credits / MPAA, "Smile 2 DP Charlie Sarroff on Lighting a Curse-Afflicted Pop Star" (October 2024)
Charlie Sarroff - CamNoir podcast, "The Creepy Cinematography of Smile 2" (October 2024)
DCFilmdom - review 4.5/5, "Smile 2: Movie Review" (October 2024)
ComicBook.com - "Smile 2 Opening Scene Explained" (October 2024)
Screen Rant - "Smile 2's Opening Scene Explained" (December 2024)
GameRant - "Smile 2 Pulls Its Cruelest Trick Right in the Opening Scene" (October 2024)
Wikipedia - Smile 2
Also read:
The Conjuring (2013) long take https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/the-conjuring - The other great horror long take in the collection: same silent Steadicam, same technique that lets the viewer breathe before suffocating them
Narrative Effectiveness: Long Take vs. Editing https://www.plan-sequences.com/blog-plan-sequences/efficacite-narrative-plan-sequence-contre-decoupage - Why eliminating jump scares by refusing to cut is more effective than any classic horror editing
