Smile Review

Smile is based on a supernatural horror film based on a short film, Laura Hasn’t Slept. Smile hopes to join the likes of The Babadook, Oculus, and Lights Out as excellent horror films based on shorts.

Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a psychiatrist at an emergency mental health unit. One of her patients is Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey), a 26-year-old post-graduate student who claims to see an evil presence. When Laura commits suicide in front of Rose the presence transfers to Rose and her sense of reality is put into question. Rose needs to find out what this spirit is and how to stop it before she takes her own life.

Smile was a mash-up of It Follows, Ringu, The Happening, and Birdbox. Smile had the same premise as It Follows where an evil entity gets transferred from person to person. Only the victim can see the entity and they can look like anyone. Rose was like Reiko in Ringu because they both were cursed which would kill them in a week, so they must investigate the origins of the curse. Whilst The Happening and Birdbox comparisons were due to the monster in those films causing their victims to kill themselves.

Smile does lift from two well-regarded horror films and the concept of something so horrific which drove people to kill themselves was a terrifying idea. Smile did start with some promise because it opened with Rose dreaming about childhood trauma, showing Rose doing her job, and when Laura arrived at the hospital she was tied to a stretcher and screaming in terror. Writer/director Parker Finn wanted to show off with his feature film debut by using many fancy camera movements and editing transitions. It was a film with a lot of flash to it. Finn’s a man with ambition.

The film had a decent starting block for a horror film. There was a terrifying threat, the smile characters did was creepy – as shown in the marketing campaign, and Rose had to face her personal trauma as well as the monster. But it was a film that devolved into a mix of over-familiarity, jump scares, and unintentional comedy. An example of this is during a birthday party where Rose gives her nephew an unpleasant gift. It was meant to be a gory scene that showed Rose’s sense of reality being questioned but it was a predictable moment and the way it was acted and directed came across as humorous instead of scary.

Smile felt old hat in the current horror landscape. When Rose first saw the entity out a window it felt too similar to when Jay first saw her tormentor in It Follows. It Follows was much better at showing the paranoia the main character was suffering. The idea of a character inheriting their parent’s mental issue was handled better in films like Hereditary and Last Night in Soho. Whilst the investigation aspect of Smile’s story was more compelling in Ringu.

The current landscape of horror cinema has produced some great films, primarily because of the rise of Blumhouse and A24. However, Smile shows how predictable mainstream horror can still be.