As proven by everything from The Man Who Laughs and Joker to It, American Horror Story and The Black Phone, there are few things creepier than a toothy, enthusiastic-to-the-point-of-derangement grin. Smile takes that idea to its extreme, building an entire horror film around an ear-to-ear smirk that affixes itself to people’s faces right before homicidal nastiness occurs. As far as signature sights go, it’s a reliably unnerving one, and it—along with a healthy dose of cheese and The Ring-by-way-of-It Follows derivation—do much to make writer/director Parker Finn’s feature debut the sort of entertainingly dim, unoriginal and shock tactic-loving studio effort that’s catnip for teens venturing out to the multiplex with friends on a Friday night.
Making “turn that frown upside down” literal via a litany of show-off shots in which the camera rotates and loop-de-loops in order to flip the action, Smile is a tale about the unholy hell wrought—in the mind, and in the real world—from witnessing trauma. For Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a therapist who treats psychiatric patients at a New Jersey hospital, the painful incident that shaped her life was the suicidal death of her boozing, pill-popping mother, which she observed as a child and propelled her on her medical path. Rose is a calm and caring physician who tells her patients that the things they’re seeing don’t exist and can’t hurt them. While that may be true about manic Carl (Jack Sochet), who mutters standard-issue spooky stuff about how “We’re all going to die,” it’s less accurate when it comes to Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey), a college student who shows up in Rose’s admittance room with a wild story to tell.
[Minor Spoilers Follow]
According to Laura, she’s being stalked by an evil invisible specter that sometimes resembles people she knows, and other times takes the form of strangers. Regardless, those figures are always doing their best Clown Prince of Crime impersonation, and they don’t seem very friendly. Laura claims that this malevolence began when her professor took a claw hammer to his face in front of her, for reasons that make about as much sense as her own current haunting. Rose instinctively considers this to be a figment of Laura’s deluded psyche, which sets her up for another dose of lethal distress when Laura freaks out in her presence, develops her own awfully creepy grin, and uses a very sharp object to carve a smiley face-style gash in her neck.
Unsurprisingly, this calamitous day on the job rattles Rose, who goes home and chugs some wine with her back to the refrigerator—a residential location that weirdly turns into a recurring hot spot for unpleasantness (and broken glasses). Rose’s fiancé Trevor (The Boys’ Jessie T. Usher) is less sympathetic to his future wife’s travails than her cat Mustache, and he soon becomes a pain in the ass to whom Rose can’t turn. Luckily for her, one of the cops investigating Laura’s self-inflicted demise is her ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), a sweet and friendly guy whom she initially rebuffs before realizing he’s the only one who cares about her as well as has the connections she needs to aid her sleuthing. That inquiry ramps up quickly once she begins seeing Laura and a collection of likeminded smiling-like-crazy apparitions both in her dreams and, more distressing still, during her waking hours.
Finn has a habit of staging gruesome nightmarishness and then revealing it to be a hallucination or slumbering reverie, although that hoary gimmick isn’t nearly as tired as his jump scares. That said, there’s something amusing about the writer/director’s unwavering dedication to jolting his audience in any and every corny way possible, be it via the sound of a cat food can being opened, a car honking at a jaywalking pedestrian, or a ghoul popping out of the shadows to scream with demonic rage. These moments are almost never frightening, but they’re so routine that they wind up inadvertently benefiting Smile, bringing jack-in-the-box tension to just about every one of its compositions. Aiding that situation is Finn’s shrewd use of background space—a darkened doorway, or a window looking out onto a forest—to suggest hungry and deformed creatures lying in wait, ready to burst forth at any moment.
All of this renders Smile a cheap amusement park ride, and yet that doesn’t mean it’s not a frequently pleasurable one. Though the film has no genuine interest in trauma as an infectious plague that corrupts and destroys—and can only be overcome through direct confrontation—it takes its nerve-rattling duties seriously. In its first half, Finn’s beaming phantoms lend the proceedings a requisite chill, and Bacon enthusiastically transforms Rose from a poised and professional woman of reason into a red-eyed, frantic promoter of curses and superstitions, which earns her lots of concerned and distraught responses from her unkind sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), her considerate boss Dr. Desai (Kal Penn) and her former psychiatrist Dr. Northcott (Robin Weigert). At least a few of these supporting players get a chance to show off their sinister sneering stuff, and while that image results in diminished returns—in large part because some of the actors’ smiles are more unsettling than others—Finn admirably stays the course, going bigger and bolder right up until his monstrous finale.
Save for a couple of exposition-heavy scenes about Rose and Holly’s youth that no one, including the actors and director, seem to care about, Smile moves at a swift pace, coating itself in a bruised color palette and employing a score that veers from music-box twinkling to calamitous clamor at a moment’s notice. Finn doesn’t just borrow from the aforementioned horror films but also The Conjuring and even Alien 3, and once his story reveals the mechanics behind its mayhem, it loses a decent bit of steam. Still, by melding familiar elements into something that feels, if not new, then at least suitably polished and animated, Smile does just enough to earn the midnight-movie status it desperately craves. And if an econo-line franchise ensues, well, that won’t be anything to grimace about.
