Smile is a horror movie in the vein of The Ring (2002) or It Follows (2014) in that it creates a sustained mood and follows a heroine as she attempts to figure out a fairly complicated mythology of the supernatural thing that wants to kill her. It isn’t as good as either of those films and it has a few too many jump scares for my tastes, but it is still a good time at the movies.
Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a therapist at the emergency psychiatric ward of a hospital. She is overworked and always exhausted, but kind and generous with her time. One day Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) comes into the hospital. She says she recently witnessed her professor kill himself and ever since she has been terrorized by an entity that appears as different people smiling strangely at her. This entity has foretold her death. Then Laura gets her own creepy smile and slices her face open.
Rose then begins seeing strange visions of people smiling that same strange smile. She first enlists the help of her boyfriend (Jessie T. Usher) and her therapist (Robin Weigert) but neither of them truly believes what is happening to her. She is able to get her cop ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner) to assist her and they learn that she has become cursed by some evil entity that thrives on trauma. Each person with the curse kills themself in some horrible manner in front of a witness causing the curse to be passed onto them.
Rose has previously suffered her own trauma watching her mother succumb to mental illness as a child and being the one to find her dead body after she killed herself. It has become cliche these days for horror movies to be about trauma, but all too often those films don’t do the work. So, it is nice to see a film that understands trauma and how it lingers. And how other characters around you may not understand how your trauma affects you, even when they have well meaning intentions.
Like It Follows I found myself constantly studying the the background, the edges of the screen looking for someone with that smile. Knowing the entity could appear at any moment and look like anyone kept an edge-of-my-seat tension going throughout. I kind of wish there had been more of that. There weren’t enough moments where she’s seeing strangers smile.
In the same way, I wish they’d followed her just a little while longer researching The Smile. Rose and Joel figured out that it affected a few people then basically stop. They talk to one guy who survived it and get a sort-of answer but then do nothing about it. I’m pushing towards true spoiler territory here so I’ll just say the decisions it makes with these things didn’t always work for me. This is especially true of the very end which felt more like a setup for the inevitable series of sequels than a truly satisfying conclusion to this movie.
But that tension building really worked for me and there are several truly great jump scares. Sosie Bacon is terrific and it is always great to see Robin Weigert in anything. The direction from first-timer Parker Finn is mostly good but there were far too many crooked angle shots and that thing where a shot starts out upside down and then it slowly rights itself.
If you liked It Follows and The Ring then I’d definitely give this one a shot.
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