Smile
Year: 2022
Director: Parker Finn
Starring: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner & Jessie T. Usher
Runtime: 115 mins
BBFC: 18
Published: 11/10/22
Director: Parker Finn
Starring: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner & Jessie T. Usher
Runtime: 115 mins
BBFC: 18
Published: 11/10/22
I’m not even really sure why I even bothered to go and watch Smile. Having seen the trailer which offered up a couple of vaguely intriguing jump scares I read a few reviews of the film saying that despite its reliance on fake out scares, the genuine ones were pretty good. That was apparently enough to sell me on it; me, the man who finds jump scares tediously dull and ineffective. So was Smile worth checking out, or did I walk out with a grimace on my face?
When psychiatrist Rose (Sosie Bacon) witnesses the suicide of one of her patients she finds herself stalked by an entity that always has a threatening smile on its face.
Desperate to prove to her family, friends, and colleagues that she’s not crazy, Rose must break the curse before it consumes her.
When psychiatrist Rose (Sosie Bacon) witnesses the suicide of one of her patients she finds herself stalked by an entity that always has a threatening smile on its face.
Desperate to prove to her family, friends, and colleagues that she’s not crazy, Rose must break the curse before it consumes her.
Growing up I was terrified of The Ring. I’ve never seen the Japanese original, but the 2003 US remake was enough to give me the willies, and even to this day I find it extremely creepy. Smile has the same basic premise, someone unwittingly exposes themself to a curse and has a few days to work out what’s happening before it’s too late. Cue plenty of jump scares involving messed up faces.
That’s pretty much all Smile has to offer, but in a gorier and less effective way than The Ring managed almost twenty years ago. It also has elements of 2014’s It Follows, a horror I absolutely adore, but handled much less gracefully. There were perhaps two scares that landed for me, and the rest were incredibly by the numbers. The frequency at which they happen was a problem as well. Desensitisation is the word of the day here and with Smile I was less than halfway through when a scary face and music sting for the umpteenth time wore extremely thin.
Smile is also very flabby in the middle; based off a short film that director Parker Finn once made, Smile absolutely would have been more effective with a leaner runtime and faster paced story.
Visually the film owes a lot to Nia DaCosta’s Candyman sequel from last year. Had I not seen that film I would have been thoroughly impressed by all the inverted camera angles and allowing the frame plenty of space to breathe. But having liked the Candyman sequel quite a bit, Smile feels like an imitation rather than paying homage to those same shots.
Smile is fine. It’s not bad but it’s not particularly good either. I wouldn’t bother heading to the cinema to watch it as a home viewing once it hits streaming will more than suffice. It feels like an amalgamation of multiple different and better films with few original ideas of its own, not a surprise for a jump scare laden low budget horror but I had hoped for more following that promising trailer. Grimace it is then.
That’s pretty much all Smile has to offer, but in a gorier and less effective way than The Ring managed almost twenty years ago. It also has elements of 2014’s It Follows, a horror I absolutely adore, but handled much less gracefully. There were perhaps two scares that landed for me, and the rest were incredibly by the numbers. The frequency at which they happen was a problem as well. Desensitisation is the word of the day here and with Smile I was less than halfway through when a scary face and music sting for the umpteenth time wore extremely thin.
Smile is also very flabby in the middle; based off a short film that director Parker Finn once made, Smile absolutely would have been more effective with a leaner runtime and faster paced story.
Visually the film owes a lot to Nia DaCosta’s Candyman sequel from last year. Had I not seen that film I would have been thoroughly impressed by all the inverted camera angles and allowing the frame plenty of space to breathe. But having liked the Candyman sequel quite a bit, Smile feels like an imitation rather than paying homage to those same shots.
Smile is fine. It’s not bad but it’s not particularly good either. I wouldn’t bother heading to the cinema to watch it as a home viewing once it hits streaming will more than suffice. It feels like an amalgamation of multiple different and better films with few original ideas of its own, not a surprise for a jump scare laden low budget horror but I had hoped for more following that promising trailer. Grimace it is then.