"Smile" - Film Review
It’s easy to write Smile off as one of the dime-a-dozen horror movies that has gruesome kills and a lackluster plot. The marketing leading up to the film’s release would certainly give the impression that Smile is nothing more than cheap popcorn horror. It does have moments of jump scares over substance, but beneath the musical stings and gore is the glimmer of something more.
Rose (Sosie Bacon) is a psychiatrist who works in an intensive mental health ward. She’s been working 80-hour weeks and is emotionally and physically exhausted. When a young PhD student (Caitlin Stasey) commits suicide in front of her minutes after describing a smiling, shape-shifting entity that’s haunting her, Rose’s own mental health hits an all-time low. Now Rose is being plagued by that same shape-shifting entity, and she will die within a week unless she figures out a way to stop it.
CREDIT: Paramount Pictures/Paramount +
Smile’s unseeable entity will remind the audience of It Follows, which featured a similar invisible spirit, though the supernatural force in It Follows was transmitted sexually. InSmile, the entity is passed from person to person through trauma. It’s a bit of a heavy-handed approach to the ways grief, guilt, and trauma affect people. Somewhere, buried in the far-too-long, nearly two-hour movie, is something quite meaningful about how to process traumatic events, but audiences are robbed of a truly cathartic ending for Rose. Writer/director Parker Finn offers a bait-and-switch more than a few times in the film’s final act. Instead of seeing Rose as our Final Girl, Finn wanted to create an ending that will keep viewers guessing.
Finn makes a valiant effort in his multiple pseudo-endings and the moment the other shoe drops is truly unnerving, but it doesn’t amount to enough. The final showdown between Rose and the manifestations of the entity doesn’t feel entirely earned. These scenes are like an afterthought added by executives who were worried there wasn’t enough spooky stuff to allow audiences to get the bang for their buck they were looking for. That’s where they’d be wrong, though. Even taking the jump scares out of consideration, the face-splitting smiles are more than unsettling, and Bacon is more than capable as a lead. She manages to sell the terror of her character, even when she’s delivering lines like "my eyes are open now. I've been cursed."
CREDIT: Walter Thomson/Paramount Pictures/Paramount +
Smile is nothing revolutionary, but it is creepy, and sometimes that’s enough. It’s more memorable than any recent iteration of Paranormal Activity and will certainly be a hit at sleepovers, but there’s not much more hidden beneath those sinister grins.
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