Naomi Scott Deserved the Same Praise for SMILE 2 That Inde Navarrette Is Getting for OBSESSION

It’s kind of wild watching Inde Navarrette earn massive praise for Obsession when Naomi Scottdelivered an equally ferocious horror performance in Smile 2 two years earlier and never became part of the same mainstream awards conversation.

To be clear, this isn’t about taking anything away from Navarrette. She’s fantastic in Obsession, and the praise coming her way is deserved. Some critics are already calling her performance Oscar-worthy, and it’s easy to understand why.

Still, watching that reaction immediately made me think about Scott. As Skye Riley in Smile 2, Scott basically had the entire movie sitting on her shoulders.

She spends nearly the whole runtime being pushed through panic, addiction, grief, paranoia, fear, and eventually a complete psychological collapse. It’s an unhinged, physically exhausting performance, and Scott commits to every ugly second of it.

At the time, critics praised her work as phenomenal, career-defining, and one of the best horror performances of 2024. Yet that acclaim never seemed to break through into the larger Hollywood conversation.

I loved Scott in the movie, and in my review of Smile 2 I wrote: “Naomi Scott's performance is awesome. She fully commits to the role, and you can feel her fear and desperation through every frame. It’s not easy to carry a horror film with this kind of emotional intensity, but she pulls it off in a big way.

“Whether she’s screaming in terror or grappling with her inner demons, Scott’s energy is explosive, and she adds so much depth to the character. It’s one of those performances plunges you deeper into the horror.”

Two years later, Navarrette is receiving the kind of attention that Scott never got. Navarrette absolutely goes for it in Obsession. I enjoyed her performance a lot, and she deserves to be recognized for what she brings to the film. If I’m comparing the two, though, Scott gave the stronger performance for me.

What makes the difference in reception so interesting is how much both performances demand from their actors.

These are two different movies and two different characters, but both ask their leads to completely lose themselves on screen. Scott was doing that same kind of emotionally and physically intense work in Smile 2, yet Hollywood never embraced it in quite the same way.

Part of the difference may simply come down to how the two performances were packaged and received. Smile 2 arrived as a sequel to an already successful studio horror franchise, so a lot of the conversation naturally centered on whether it could top the first movie, how scary it was, and where the franchise could go next.

Scott’s performance was incredible, but it was still operating inside a recognizable commercial property with an established mythology, and plenty of franchise expectations surrounding it.

Obsession, on the other hand, gave Navarrette a performance that audiences and critics could discover without all of that baggage. There’s also an element of timing involved.

Scott was already a recognizable star when Smile 2 came out, while Navarrette’s performance feels more like a breakout moment, and critics tend to get especially excited when an actor seemingly comes out of nowhere and completely takes over a movie.

Sometimes the narrative around a performance matters almost as much as the performance itself. Navarrette has the exciting discovery story working in her favor, while Scott’s work may have been unfairly treated as coming from an already established actor in a major studio sequel.

None of that makes Scott’s performance any less impressive, but it could help explain why the reaction surrounding the two has been so different.

Ultimately, there probably isn’t one clean explanation for why these two performances inspired such different reactions. Hollywood recognition can come down to timing, momentum, perception, and whether a particular performance catches fire with the right people at the right moment.

Navarrette is having that moment with Obsession, and she deserves to enjoy it. I just wish Scott had been given hers with Smile 2, because two years later, her performance still hits just as hard.