Smile

Kudos to the marketing department for this one because who knew people smiling could be so creepy! Focusing on therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) after she witnesses a particularly brutal suicide right before her very eyes, Smile follows Rose as she tries to figure out why only moments before the deceased inexplicably decided to slit her own throat, the victim had the compelling urge to grin from ear-to-ear like she was auditioning for a cheesy toothpaste ad. Starting to see smiling people all around her in hallucinations she can’t exactly explain, Rose decides to get down to the bottom of what is plaguing her no matter the cost; a darker and far more dangerous task than she may be ready for and one she might not even have the ability to survive. I have to hand it to filmmaker Parker Finn in his feature directorial debut because after being offered to adapt his short film, Laura Hasn’t Slept, into a feature-length movie for Paramount+, the test screenings went so well that the studio decided to put it into theaters. And good thing they did, because outside of some growing pains stretching a short into a feature-length movie, Smile is a solid first step into the realm of Hollywood for Finn and shows that original horror simply needs the right creative minds behind it to work. Strung along by a somewhat uneven sense of dread as Rose tries to unravel the mysteries behind all the creepy smirking going on, the general tone of this film is spot-on for the story being told as there are more than a few scenes that were well-handled in the scare department, especially a bonkers finale that honestly saved a lot of the movie for me. And though I enjoyed more than a few scenes here and there, the film still felt a bit too repetitive, a bit too stretched thin, and above all, a bit too safe for me in terms of the run-of-the-mill horror story being told. Throw in some cliche elements that stay noticeable throughout, and I ultimately think Smile was mostly as effective as it wanted to be, despite not being as good as it could have been. So while I do have faith in a director that seems to get it when it comes to making a genre film such as this, Smile has too many familiar, less-than-compelling narrative beats along with a premise that I feel didn’t entirely deliver on its promise. Yet with a few great scares, creepy visuals, solid direction, and a promise that there will likely be a sequel or two at some point, I can still call this one a success, just a flawed one.