Smile review: A hard-hitting horror movie that puts a grin on your face

Polygon will be reporting live from 2022 Fantastic Fest on all things horror, science-fiction, and action. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere.

Parker Finn’s debut horror movie Smile Each one is designed to be different for different audiences. To someone who isn’t well versed in horror, it’s an efficient and effective scare-fest, full of big, startling scares and freaky, grinding tension.

It works differently for those who are savvy in horror and can see the similarities between Finn’s horror films and their own, so they know exactly where to find the plot. SmileMany times, the actor winks at their audience offering a silent smile. You are probably wondering what happens next. You can see how bad this could get, can’t you? It’s easy to see at any moment what Finn is doing with his characters, and where he’s aiming the story — and that seems to be entirely deliberate. Even so, it’s never easy to shrug off the impact when the promised horrors arrive.

Working from a previous short film, 2020’s Laura Hasn’t Slept, Finn’s script takes almost no time to establish who his protagonist is before her world starts falling apart. Working in a hospital’s emergency psychiatric ward, therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is used to seeing people in crisis, and talking them down. Then she encounters a badly shaken patient who claims she’s haunted by some sort of malevolent entity no one else can see, a creature with a horrifying smile who torments her by appearing in the guise of people she knows.

Image: Paramount Pictures

The story sounds like a paranoid delusion — and when Rose tries to talk to other people about the shape-changing, invisible, malevolent curse-creature, she sounds like she’s having paranoid delusions, too. “I’m not crazy,” she professes to her blandly kind fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher), her brittle older sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), and her patrician former therapist Madeline (Robin Weigert, in a role that’s light-years away from her turn as Deadwood’s Calamity Jane). But Rose can’t find a way to sound convincing when she says it, especially to a world that’s cynical and unsympathetic toward the mentally ill.

SmileIt is often an over-the-top, corny horror movie. The sheer number of jump-scares makes it laughable. Finn makes use of abrupt sound cues, rapid cuts, and loud sounds to make viewers frown over seemingly insignificant things like Rose eating a hamburger or cutting off her hangnails. But no matter how excessively the legitimate scares pile up, they’re startling and convincing. Music and editing are superbly tuned to maximize the impact of slow-burning tensions that end in an unexpected, unpleasant surprise. It all adds up to a great experience. Smile A smooth ride but not unrelenting.

Finn does the exact opposite of magicians, showing the audience how to do the trick and then performing it so well that it looks almost like magic. His scripts are a good example of his style. Smile After The Ring, with Rose experiencing an inciting incident, discovering she’s on a deadly deadline, drawing in her reluctant but soulful ex to help her, then doing research into the phenomenon, with worrying results. There were other movies that came after. The Ring’s beats just felt derivative (including several of its own clumsy sequels), Smile Uses the familiarity of the story as a way to create anticipation. Rose discovers the solution to her problem. Smile invites viewers to consider the logical endpoint of her discovery, and wonder whether she’ll make the same selfish choice Naomi Watts’ character made in The Ring — Who will be the victim?

Walter Thomson is an MPA approved.

Similarly, Smile’s setup broadly mimics the one in It will follow, with a threat passed virally from person to person, proceeding implacably toward its next victim, while wearing a variety of faces, turning everyone in the protagonist’s life into a potential threat. But this time, the protagonist is not feeling like a replica. Smile uses the familiarity to heighten the sense of danger, until viewers can’t trust anyone they see on screen to be human — which puts them neatly inside Rose’s increasingly disintegrating mindset.

Human element Smile is as carefully calibrated as the jump scares, in ways designed to keep the audience worrying when they aren’t flinching. Finn populates the story with vulnerable potential victims: Longtime horror fans know to be worried when it turns out that Rose has a beloved cat, or that Holly has a sweet 7-year-old boy, or that Rose’s helpful ex Joel (Kyle Gallner) is sensitive, open-hearted, and still in love with her. (Kal Penn also pops up as Rose’s supervisor, in a role that seems particularly designed to provide a target for mayhem.) Rose’s struggle to suppress a childhood trauma which is part of Holly’s, and partly what is creating so much tension between Holly and Rose creates some really rich emotional ground. Smile is almost painfully efficient in setting up for calamity: It’s bare-bones storytelling, with every new character or element designed to strengthen the sense of dread over who’s likely to die, and how badly.

The movie’s central theme adds to the sense of dread as well. From the moment a policeman dismisses his responsibility to investigate a grotesque death by writing the victim off with a cavalier “She sounds fucking crazy to me!”, it’s evident that at heart, Smile It is about stigmatizing mental illness and demonizing those who live with it.

Image: Paramount Pictures

Finn discovers fertile ground within the huge and potentially unbridgeable gap that exists between sufferers, and even well-intentioned outsiders. The audience’s sympathy is likely to be with Rose, who’s living with a terror she doesn’t know how to fight. But it’s also easy to see why other people would find it discomfiting, trying to deal with a woman who’s behaving erratically and even dangerously, while blaming it all on some kind of incomprehensible fear-demon.

A deeper version of this movie might go even further into ambiguity about Rose’s situation, lingering on the question of whether she really is just having a psychotic episode, brought on by stress, overwork, and legitimate trauma. Finn steers clear of that direction, making it quite obvious throughout that something supernatural is at play. It’s a reasonable choice to make in a movie this devoted to piling up fear atop fear, in getting the audience to anticipate the worst that could happen, while authentically caring about the people who might suffer when it does. It is still a robbery. Smile Potential subtlety.

But there’s nothing wrong with a horror movie that’s more designed to terrify an audience than to play games with them. Finn, as a director and writer, seems to be aware that horror films can appeal to different audiences. Some might find them more educational than others. Either way, he does an impressive job of making sure they’ll all come away satisfied, and at least a little shaken.

SmileOpening in Theaters: Sept. 30,