“Smile 2” is a genuinely horrific plunge into terror.

Writer-director Parker Finn revives his 2022 creation with a sequel of real ambition. Dude spent a LOT of Paramount’s money on production values for an authentically artistic, high-minded, lowdown and gory fright fest so good it makes you ponder why everybody else in this justly maligned genre doesn’t try this hard.

And “Aladdin” co-star Naomi Scott gives herself over to this “universe,” this role and this experience with a career-making commitment that should make other filmmakers casting roles in any genre sit up and say “Why not Naomi?”

The picture’s so polished and cleverly executed that one does wonder how this franchise will top it. It’s kind of the last word on movies about the demonic presence that once you see its latest victim smile, you know you’re next and that you’re doomed.

Scott plays Skye Riley, a pop starlet set to come back from an accident that should have finished her physically, emotionally and professionally. She and her equally-stoned boyfriend had a car wreck and he was killed.

A year later, she’s got a new LP — “Too Much for One Heart” — to promote, complex dances to rehearse, lingering injuries to “power through” and damage control to do on Drew Barrymore’s chat show.

Skye doesn’t have rehab or twelve-step sponsors. She’s got her taskmaster mom (Rosemarie DeWitt of TV’s “Mad Men” and “The Boys”). And Mom is here to remind her of all her “responsibilities.”

Skye has been taught to gulp pricey Voss water anytime she’s stressed enough to figure she could use a chemical pick-me-up or calm-me-down. It doesn’t work. But checking in with her old drug dealer (Lukas Gage) turns out to be the mistake to end all mistakes.

Lewis is manic, hallucinating and dangerous. He pulls a samurai sword on her at the door. Perhaps the least believable moment in the movie is when Skye doesn’t flee the instant that blade’s not on her neck.

But that’s addiction for you. Maybe she’ll give him a bad Google review later.

Seeing Lewis smile before he bashes his own skull in seals Skye’s fate. Not that she knows this. Not right away.

“Smile 2″ tracks through over an hour of letting us see the problems this new smile” terror has to compete with in Skye’s harried mind.

Mom’s always reminding Naomi of all the people — dancers, backup singers, bookers, venue owners, road crew, her record company — “counting on you.” She’s loaded with guilt about her addiction, the accident, the fans she has to meet and greet and the best friend (Dylan Gelula of TV’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Loot” and “Hacks”) she cussed-out and dumped.

And now she’s having hallucinations — about Lewis, about Paul her actor-beau, about the end game some demented fan may have planned for her.

A prologue has shown us one man’s efforts to outsmart this curse by passing it on to drug dealers. We wait for the third act for Skye to have this threat explained to her by a stranger (Peter Jacobson), forcing her to ponder her fate, her responsibilities and just what she can do to change her dying-young-destiny.

Scott lets us see more than a pretty face with great dance chops. We see the insecurities of a short-shelf-life career, one marred by physical and emotional scars she’s got to hide to be a success. We drop into the loneliness of stardom, the pressures and limited options for people you can truly call on when the chips or down or you just need a real shoulder to cry on that doesn’t belong to someone on your payroll.

While the movie summons up memories of Britney and Demi and other pop stars troubled by their “success,”{ I found the middle acts in “Smile 2” to be a tad too indulgent and teasing. Suspense builds as Skye melts down, but writer-director Finn gets a little lost in the “Star is Reborn” aspects of Skye’s experience.

And twists and jolts aside, when the time comes to wrap all this up, Finn’s own options are limited by the genre he’s thriving in and the corner his story and universe’s “rules” have painted him into.

It’s still a good, grim and pitiless parable masquerading as a horror movie. It makes you remember to be good to those close to you. Show a little empathy, leave time for mental health days and distance yourself from people who can’t grasp that. Because all that taking care of your teeth does is ensure you have a killer smile.

Rating: R, gory gory GORY violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Naomi Scott, Lukas Gage, Dylan Gelula, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Peter Jacobson and Rosemarie DeWitt.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Parker Finn. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:07

Unexpected phone rings received in the middle of the night aren’t usually the bearer of good news. In “Home Again” writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s middling LA-based dramedy “Goodrich,” the title character (played by Michael Keaton) learns it the hard way. A call from his wife wakes Andy Goodrich up in the wee hours, informing this shocked, aloof husband (who hasn’t even noticed that she wasn’t home) that she’s checked into a Malibu rehab for 90 days to address her addiction problem, leaving Andy to care for their 9-year-old twins. Also, she tells him she’ll be leaving him as soon as she’s out.

Affecting with his mournful gaze, expressively arched eyebrows and the signature mystique of his husky voice, an understated Keaton carries this insightful and generously composed opening, proving that the septuagenarian actor is as game for material grounded in earthly concerns as he is to re-create his frisky “Beetlejuice” flamboyance. This opening also happens to be among the best pieces of writing that Meyers-Shyer (daughter of renowned filmmakers Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer) has in store throughout “Goodrich,” charged with the kind of narrative economy that intrigues the viewer about the juicy story to come.

Through these moments of tracing Andy’s escalating attempts to understand the seriousness of the situation, we learn that he hasn’t exactly been a model husband or father — not to his young twins Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Mose (Jacob Kopera), and certainly not to Grace (a wonderful Mila Kunis), his daughter from his first marriage, who’s now expecting her own child. Having always prioritized his work in the art world as a gallery owner, Andy still mixes up his kids’ names and doesn’t have a clue about his wife’s drug dependency, when everyone else in his circle seems way ahead of him in sensing that something was up with her habitual pill-popping.

The caliber of the writing “Goodrich” fluctuates considerably after this arresting introductory segment, as scenes unfold like mini episodes — some, skillfully rendered, others, flat and trite — that Meyers-Shyer’s script unevenly steers. At its core, her story feels like an ode to ensemble-driven domestic fare (picture an R-rated “We Bought a Zoo”), honoring the importance of family and communal camaraderie as Andy finds his true place amid the many roles he’s expected to play. In some sense, it’s the kind of thoughtful cinematic comfort food we don’t get much of anymore: a movie with a reliable cast you’d casually stroll into on a whim, and leave satisfied. Except, a rambling impression hampers the good intentions of “Goodrich,” making one crave for something leaner, with a firmer handle on pacing.

Instead, the film frequently drags and begs for some compact montages, the kind that punched up many a Shyer-Meyers movie, like “Baby Boom.” Here, an excess of material diminishes the film’s humor and poignancy, though many of the story’s characters are colorful enough, when they aren’t written too artificially.

Young Billie (and the guiltless Blair, who’s stuck with some impractical lines) gets the short end of the stick here, with an over-precocious vocabulary and mannerisms that are cringingly beyond her years. (An example? “Dad, if you don’t want me to talk like I live in LA, then don’t raise me in LA,” the little girl sarcastically snaps when Andy critiques her erroneous usage of the word “like.”) Thankfully, the more elegantly written Grace negates some of this miscalculation, as the fish-out-of-water Andy comes to depend on her with the twins, to help with chores and as moral support when his ultra-chic independent art gallery’s financial problems intensify. Elsewhere, Terry (Michael Urie), a recently single aspiring actor and dad who’s heartbroken after his husband’s departure, joins Andy’s circle of friends, infusing the movie with a lighter feel.

A major plot point of “Goodrich” revolves around whether Andy could win over the estate of a recently deceased Black artist, now managed by her feminist, New Agey daughter Lola (an alluring Carmen Ejogo), and save his cherished gallery from closing. This struggle happens alongside Andy’s attempts to make good with a rightfully ambivalent Grace, who’s never experienced the kind of present father that Billie and Mose now seem to enjoy. Meyers-Shyer is specific and articulate about the relatable disappointments of Grace, who nonetheless supports her father’s final shot at saving his career while navigating the challenges of her pregnancy and her iffy future in entertainment journalism. The writer-director also displays some dexterity in portraying Grace’s fulfilling marriage with Pete (Danny Deferrari), giving the couple one of the loveliest marital harmony scenes since Pixar’s “Up.”

Meyers-Shyer’s on-the-page precision sadly doesn’t extend to some other parts of her film. We meet the staff of Andy’s gallery through several disjointed scenes that don’t add up to an emotional whole. Her occasional comic-relief treatment of Terry comes dangerously close to a dated gay-best-friend cliché at times, while the Lola storyline feels like an elongated plot device generated to serve Andy’s self-discovery. Though it’s refreshing to see a powerful Black woman unafraid to articulate and demand her (and her mother’s) worth, Lola exits the story too harshly and abruptly.

On the whole, “Goodrich” is all ups and downs — a lot like Andy’s life — making you stick around for the much better movie it frequently teases, but never quite becomes.

Smile 2 has one genuinely good idea, which is that the everyday life of a messed-up pop megastar is indistinguishable from the shrieking terrors of a supernatural horror movie. Whenever director Parker Finn runs with that thought, the film has a nice, disorienting punch. The victims of horror movies usually suffer in private, stalked through dark empty houses or remote forests or abandoned corridors. Smile 2’s superstar protagonist, however, is constantly surrounded by people: hangers-on, assistants, fans, and gawkers. She suffers in full view of the public, with people all around her who could presumably help. That turns out to be just as unsettling as an eerie lake or a cabin in the woods, and more metaphorically potent to boot.

The film follows a few days in the life of global pop icon Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is returning to performing after a period in rehab and a lengthy hiatus due to a gruesome car crash that scarred her and killed her actor boyfriend Paul (Ray Nicholson). But when her old friend and dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) cracks a sinister smile before gleefully bashing his own head open with a 35-pound weight plate, things start to go truly haywire. Skye begins seeing Lewis’s figure lurking around her, as well as that of the long-deceased Paul. Most importantly, she starts to see the smiles — those unsettling, unnatural, wide grins from the first movie that tell us that demonic possession may be afoot.

At its best, Smile 2 keeps us guessing as to whether Skye is being haunted or simply dealing with the craziness of fandom. Is the sweaty, clingy creep who wants her to sign his T-shirt and won’t leave her alone a monster from the beyond, or just your average stalker? What about her incessantly supportive mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) or her obsequious assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley)? Then there’s the fact that Skye is a recovering addict. (The only reason she visits a dealer is because she’s not allowed prescription-strength pain meds but is still in agony from all her post-accident surgeries.) Could these things following her be drug-induced hallucinations? Okay, maybe “keeps us guessing” is overstating it: We know the true answer to all these questions, even if Skye doesn’t. But while the film is too much of a standard-issue horror movie to keep things ambiguous, it does make us think about how the phony smiles that surround celebrities aren’t too different from the evil smiles that surround the protagonist-victims of the Smile franchise.

Director Finn has clearly given this some thought, and he wisely doesn’t just revisit the narrative stations of the first picture. He made his feature directorial debut with that film, a surprise hit in 2022 that was an expansion of a short he’d made two years earlier. But Smile ran out of steam after establishing its nifty premise of an unseen viral demon that plastered disturbing grins on people’s faces before making them kill themselves. A world in which other people’s smiles became monstrous threats was a brilliant visual idea, one of both eerie immediacy and symbolic charge, but the movie eventually lost itself amid the predictable requirements of a genre picture.

Unfortunately, Smile 2 is similarly torn between its novel premise and the base demands of horror. It’s hard not to watch Skye’s spiraling reality and think of all the young nonfictional celebrities who’ve melted down in front of our eyes over the years: the Britneys, the Lindsays, the Amandas and Aarons and others. And yet while Scott’s appropriately freaked-out performance helps, the film never quite manages to make us care for Skye, in part because she’s a victim right from the start and things never settle down long enough for us to get any sense of her as a character. The film’s empathy exists mostly in the abstract, as Finn overdoes Skye’s fraying consciousness. Right as we should be feeling something for her increasingly helpless situation, he bludgeons us with ineffective jump scares — cheap, haphazard ones, awkwardly telegraphed and accompanied by loud booms and crashes on the soundtrack — and increasingly meaningless dream visions.

Like he did in the first film, the director has one go-to move that he relies on over and over again: to follow one particular narrative path before revealing that — psych! — it didn’t really happen. He wants it to be a rug-pulling mindfuck, but the more it occurs, the more it devalues everything we’re seeing. As Skye becomes increasingly unable to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should feel more with her. Instead, we lose interest, as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a little cynical and cruel. The movie ultimately scuttles its own ambitions.