“You can’t cheat death twice.” The tagline for The Jester 2 knowingly toys with the very predicament its creators find themselves in: how do you resurrect a concept that, while promising, never quite mastered the trick the first time around? Colin Krawchuk’s sequel attempts to double down on the carnival of cruelty he began in 2023’s The Jester, expanding the mythology of its demonic mime while testing the limits of how much showmanship can mask repetition. The result is a film that juggles energy and invention in fleeting bursts, but too often trips on its own elaborate setup.

Picking up the pieces from the first outing’s father–daughter tragedy, The Jester 2 shifts focus to teen magician Max, whose sleight-of-hand becomes both metaphor and mechanism for survival. Her encounter with the titular killer—a supernatural trickster whose violence borders on ritual—sets in motion a classic Halloween-night pursuit that pits illusion against illusion. On paper, it’s a clever conceit: the hunted becomes the performer, blurring lines between spectacle and sacrifice. Yet for all its smoke and mirrors, the film struggles to find genuine suspense amid its flourishes.

What Krawchuk continues to capture well is the tactile texture of fear. His world feels grimy, tactile, and grounded in a kind of dark vaudeville sensibility that distinguishes The Jester from its obvious cousins—Terrifier and The Bye Bye Man among them. The set pieces have an almost mechanical rhythm to them: gears grind, lights flicker, and the inevitable payoff arrives with splattering precision. There are, admittedly, some inspired kills—moments that flirt with invention without surrendering to pure sadism—and they serve as small mercies in a film otherwise content to revisit its predecessor’s beats.

Performance-wise, newcomer Max (played with gritty conviction and just enough pathos from Trentham) gives the film its pulse. She lends emotional dimension to what might otherwise have been a mere exercise in Halloween carnage. The character’s duality as performer and prey allows for some intriguing thematic play—magic as self-delusion, survival as artifice—but these moments are fleeting, buried beneath narrative repetition and pacing issues that dull the edge.

If The Jester was about potential unrealised, The Jester 2 is about potential overplayed. It suffers the fate of many horror sequels: the impulse to explain what should remain mysterious. The mask, the mythos, the magic—all begin to fray under the weight of unnecessary exposition. What’s lost is the eerie enigma that made the character work best in the shorts—a phantom that needed no backstory to haunt us.

The Prognosis:

There’s a decent film hiding beneath the face paint—a story about performance, grief, and female agency wrapped in blood-streaked pageantry—but The Jester 2 can’t quite pull the rabbit from the hat. For every clever twist or gruesome flourish, there’s a scene that drags, a trick that lands flat. It’s an average follow-up that entertains enough to justify the ticket, but not enough to warrant an encore.

In the end, this jest feels familiar, its laughter hollow. The mask remains unsettling, the kills inventive—but the magic? It’s starting to vanish.

• Saul Muerte