Directed By Parker Finn

Starring – Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner

The Plot – After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, Dr. Rose Cotter (Bacon) starts experiencing frightening occurrences that she can’t explain. Rose must confront her troubling past in order to survive and escape her horrifying new reality.

Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and adult language

(1) Smile | Official Trailer (2022 Movie) – YouTube

POSITIVES

I’ve always asserted that the most effectively unnerving horror stems from real life and the internal conflicts that resonate universally from within everyone. In this respect, “Smile” works wonders in getting under the skin of its audience, channeling psychological trauma as a living, breathing entity that materializes during a character’s most vulnerable moments, and in tow crafting an atmospheric dread that we coherently interpret as a result of Finn’s debut feature length directorial effort. This obviously garners an unforeseen depth to the screenplay that one probably wasn’t expecting after watching the bland-but-effective trailer, but “Smile” saves all of its best moments for the film itself, garnering no shortage of jolts and stomach-churning gore that stem as a result of the meticulously placed scares that in turn ratchet more than a few endearing payoffs along the way. This does lead to a few jump scares in releases, but they are the kind that are not only cleverly devised, but legitimately frightening in the anxieties they churn out, and when combined with the versatility of the various make-up designs, captures an imaginative quality to brutality that somehow balances terror with the tasteful, in ways that I continuously appreciated. With the exception of the smile gags themselves, everything in the film is garnered with practical prosthetics, offering a chilling throwback to the ages of creativity and simplicity, but with a likeness in believability that accurately depicts all of the muscles and joints that bend with unrelenting impact. Beyond this, the subtleties in make-up to represent the restlessness of our protagonist was equally effective, transcribing a transformative influence on her appearance, which only further adds to the instability in the way that people see her. This is equally reciprocated by the measures of direction, both in sight and sound, that conjures a frantically hypnotic appeal to the presentation, and one that feels all the more immersive by those haunted from this unknown menace that feeds on trauma. The cinematography here from Charlie Sarroff, the same visionary who decorated 2020’s “Relic”, captivates with gravity-bending movements, lingering long takes, and various shadow play that constantly maintains that air of fright in the atmosphere, all the while the intricacies of sound design in the musical score from Chilean composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, combines unorthodox tones in keys with the faint consciousness of voices lingering in the distance, all to create the dreaded disposition that persists within the mental framing of Rose’s frail psyche. Speaking of the lady behind the madness, Bacon is remarkable in her first leading role in over 17 years as an actress, relishing vulnerability and internal anguish in ways that are nuanced brilliantly into the air and evolution of her character, and when combined with the tenderness of a woman coming unglued at the seams of her once stable and prominent life, captured an unwavering empathy that solidified my investment to her character.

NEGATIVES

The biggest hinderance to “Smile” as a successful property is not in the ridiculousness of its gimmick, which paints a false sense of security in smiles and the matters they often suppress from inside, but rather the sum of assembled parts from its creativity, or lack thereof, which makes the script feel like a Frankenstein shell lacking a soul of its own. On the script alone, one can take similarities from “Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare” from its creepy visual, “It Follows” for the way this haunting is passed off from one person to the next, or “The Ring” for how the time frame emits an urgency to the narrative that proves the protagonist is constantly on borrowed time. My problem in gluing these matters together isn’t the lack of originality that it borrows for its own prominence, but rather the inevitability of predictability that it not only can’t escape from, but downright embraces by the climactic third act. Because I have seen each of the films previously mentioned, I knew where this film was headed in the opening twenty minutes, and from there over the course of nearly two hours, makes those down time moments between frights a sagging series of returns that we wait to catch up to our level of insight. While on that subject of timing, the pacing itself is a bit suspect around a second act that is mostly filled with exposition dumps, and for the horror hound in all of us, the biggest test of patience throughout the gags that were already given away during an overtly spoiling second trailer. Finally, while the moments of intended humor did land accurately in emitting a necessary levity to keep this from feeling like a wallowing wet blanket void of future rewatches, the unintended humor during scenes of dramatic tension were compromising in maintaining the frame of mind attained from a thickly ominous atmospheric dread. Some of these takes are remarkable for being the ones that were actually left in the finished product, while others are sloppily edited in ways that couldn’t surmise anything but a gag reflex, for the sheer redundancy for how these scenes are constructed. It’s all the more troubling when I wasn’t the only audience member audibly laughing aloud during scenes of grave distress, and at least for my money, I wish more time was spent in capturing a specifically coherent reaction for the integrity of the scene or sequence they were trying to accommodate.

OVERALL
“Smile” isn’t the most original of ideas, but it does capture a terrifying audaciousness while dissecting the parasitic influence of psychological trauma, and how the wounds attained from such have the ability to open up with time. With a spellbinding turn from Bacon, and a commanding debut direction from Finn, the film serves as the perfect kickoff to the spooky movie season, and one whose grin is full of teeth.

My Grade: 7/10 or B-