Smile – Review
115 Minutes, Rated R
Written and Directed by Parker Finn
**NOTE: this post will be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, read Mark’s review below. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, Dr. Rose Cotter starts experiencing frightening occurrences that she can’t explain. As an overwhelming terror begins taking over her life, Rose must confront her troubling past in order to survive and escape her horrifying new reality.
Smile is writer/director Parker Finn’s first feature script and directorial effort. He has done two short films previously titled The Hidebehind and Laura Hasn’t Slept.
I just watched The Hidebehind and I noticed that the creature reveal featured a very wide, creepy, smile.
Foreshadowing, anyone?
Anywho…
it’s a weird thing, being a critic and attending pre-screenings with other critics but no paying audience. Here, for example, we all basically looked at one another with the same expression on our faces… and it wasn’t a Smile.
One of the earliest comments I wrote down during the screening was “feels like a Shyamalan movie.”
How you take that will influence what you think of Smile.
Look, there are some cool aspects to this one. It’s not too spoilery to say that the central conceit is similar to The Ring or It Follows. It’s always awesome to think that you could be marked by a malevolent force simply because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time (or did a thing with the wrong person).
That said, there are a couple of glaring issues with Smile: first, Finn relies entirely too much on jump scares here. Sure, he tends to linger on dark, quiet scenes, often for too long a time, only to punctuate them with a red herring scare.
Also, as in so many horror films, people simply make bad choices. Here, no one exists in a home that has adequate lighting. Seriously, our heroine, Rose, lives in a house that seems to only be equipped with “mood lighting.”
And that mood is “spooky as fuck.”
That’s not enough to carry a film.
But the single most detrimental thing about Smile is that there simply aren’t enough of them. They’re talked about. They’re seen in the trailer, but that look only appears a handful of times throughout the film; the rest of the time, we’re simply presented with scenes of her talking about the smiling.
It’s like if you went to see The Birds and you only saw four ravens during the entire movie, but everyone spent the movie talking about them and how scary they were.
Sorry, but we should have been seeing that look everyone, in every crowd, like the viral marketing that recently took place at MLB games with a person behind home plate just… smiling.
As for the ultimate resolution/defeat of the force, it’s hard to believe it took so long to figure out how to attempt it when it was so blindingly obvious.
The performances are okay, especially Robin Weigert as Rose’s therapist, who plays, for reasons which become clear, both a concerned, nurturing doctor, and an embodiment of that titular Evil.
The ending we get could lead to a sequel, but Smile doesn’t really need one. It’s fine as an interesting standalone piece, promising but flawed.
Smile is in theaters now and stars Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert, Caitlin Stasey with Kal Penn and Rob Morgan
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