Smile had a great viral marketing campaign where they had several people sit in the stands of baseball games and smile unblinkingly into the camera inning after inning. That was cool, but it wasn’t quite enough to get me into the theater to see it. When it was released, it became the rarest thing in horror: An original horror film with no big movie stars that became a word of mouth hit, grossing over $100 million at the box office. Even as the positive word of mouth was spreading, I still somehow never found time to check it out. Now, I’m home for the holidays, it’s on Paramount+, and I no longer have an excuse. Even with little to no expectations and knowing very little about it, Smile knocked me on my ass. Unlike Barbarian, this is one horror flick that lives up to the hype.
An overworked shrink named Rose (Sosie Bacon) is horrified when her patient commits suicide right in front of her. The worse thing about it? The demented smile that remained on her face the whole time she performed the deed. Now, Rose keeps seeing weird, smiling people everywhere she goes. After doing some Encyclopedia Brown-style investigation, she discovers a pattern: Anyone who comes into contact with a sinister, smiling suicide victim will themselves commit suicide seven days later. Will Rose be able to break the curse, or is she doomed to perpetuate it?
It would be flippant to shrug Smile off as “It Follows Meets The Ring”. Yes, the bare bones of that scenario is there. However, this flick sets out and accomplishes what it intends to do a hundred times better than those two overpraised movies did.
Smile is a slow burner, but somehow writer/director Parker Finn (making one heck of a debut) cracked the code of how to make a slow burn horror flick that manages to keep the tension simmering, while at the same time carefully doling out jump scares, gross-out moments, and gnarly set pieces at expertly timed intervals, so that the audience’s patience is never once tested. In fact, these sequences (chief among them, the birthday party from hell) add to the allure and mystery of the premise.
A lot of that has to do with Bacon’s performance. She runs the gamut from caring doctor to raving lunatic with about a hundred different shades in between. The film wouldn’t be as effective as it is if we didn’t believe the terror she was experiencing, and brother, we buy it hook, line, and sinker.
I joke about every horror movie these days being about “trauma”. Smile is the first one to say, “Yup, that’s what this one is all about: TRAUMA. Bold, underlined, italicized trauma.” What’s interesting and effective about the film is the way the supernatural menace assaults its victims much like, say, PTSD. They go around having a fairly good day without a care in the world until the entity (trauma) comes tumbling down on them like a ton of bricks, making them on edge, unable to cope, and pushing themselves away from their loved ones.
The wildest part is the ending (Vaguest of Spoilers Ahead, but it’s hard not to discuss the thing that makes the film so great), in which our heroine finally confronts the monster (trauma) head-on. And I don’t mean “wild” as in it’s crazy or weird. I mean “wild” as in I’ll be damned if I didn’t get a little choked up. We all have a little trauma inside us all. Smile foregoes a fiery, balls-to-the-walls conclusion befitting a great horror movie, and instead gives its heroine an opportunity to confront, reconcile, and move on from her past trauma (monster)… Of course, then it continues onto a fiery, balls-to-the-walls conclusion befitting a great horror movie.
Smile sure left this horror fan grinning from ear to ear.
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