Despite high concept marketing, an overreliance on jump scares leaves me stony-faced during Smile

Adapted from his own 2020 short film LAURA HASN’T SLEPT, writer/ director Parker Finn takes the welcome approach of making SMILE a continuation rather than a rehash of the original, with Caitlin Stacey reprising her role of Laura and providing the instigating events which set SMILE into motion.

When Laura Weaver, a patient complaining of hallucinations of smiling people foretelling her death calmly slits her own throat in front of her, Doctor Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is understandably horrified. But when another of her patients apparently starts grinning maniacally and predicting Rose’s own death, she begins to experience hallucinations of her own. As the hallucinations increase in frequency and intensity, Rose begins to believe that she is dealing with some kind of supernatural entity and must find a way to free herself of the curse.

The success of the viral marketing for the film lies in the simplicity of its motif, the smile. That damned smile. It’s a masterpiece of visual horror, the dissonance of the grinning mouth and the humourless, dead eyes, tapping into the exact same source of unease that both draws us into and repels us from the Uncanny Valley. Unfortunately, the trouble with this particular damned smile – and damned it surely is – is that it’s surrounded by a dull, almost studiously grey film which throws away its chilling potential in an escalating series of obnoxious jump scares and Russian-doll style bait-and-switch hallucinatory escapades.

That it succeeds at all is down to a strong central performance from Sosie Bacon, who shoulders the entire film while the underused supporting cast drift in and out, never quite behaving in a believable or sympathetic manner. There’s little to no flirting with ambiguity despite the unreliable nature of the narration and we’re left in little doubt that something supernatural is at work but while the entity’s nature isn’t clearly articulated, it’s hard to shake the feeling that SMILE falls back on retreading that path walked by the likes of THE RING or IT FOLLOWS instead of sinking its teeth into something fresh.

Despite its clinical setting, it doesn’t even find anything pertinent or insightful to say about the very real life horrors of untreated trauma and satisfies itself with a dispiritingly formulaic storytelling approach.

SMILE does have a few bravura moments (Rose’s nephew’s birthday party is a standout) and apparently ingratiated itself enough with cinema audiences to merit a sequel so I guess we’ll just have to grin and bear it for now.

Smile Review

logo

Related posts

Raya And The Last Dragon (2021) Review

Raya And The Last Dragon (2021) Review

Raya And The Last Dragon brings the visuals and the vocals but this dragon tale still come up short. Opening with an enigmatic introduction that plays out like Disney’s TOMB RAIDER, RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON introduces us to our latest animated icon: Raya, daughter of the Chief of the...

Dune: Part Two (2024) Review

Dune: Part Two (2024) Review

Dune: Part Two fulfills the prophesied hype. Is Denis Villeneuve the cinematic Kwisatz Haderach? As much as I did enjoy Denis Villeneuve’s DUNE (Part One), it’s fair to say I had a couple of gripes. One was that, despite the shiny newness afforded by modern special effects, I...

Arthur Christmas (2011) Review

Arthur Christmas (2011) Review

Arthur Christmas reimagines the North Pole as a festive Westeros as the Claus family play a game of thrones. By the end of my first time of watching “Arthur Christmas” in the cinema, I’d already welled up a couple of times and my excuse of having ‘something in my eye’ was starting to...

Doctor Who: The Woman Who Lived Review

Doctor Who: The Woman Who Lived Review

I take a stand and deliver my review of The Woman Who Lived “The Woman Who Lived” is much more of a philosophical piece than its immediate predecessor but the richness of the metaphysical musings can’t cover for the paucity of the rest of the...

Bombshell (2020) Review

Bombshell (2020) Review

In a world of spin, propaganda and outright lies, Fox News may seem like a counter-intuitive choice for a fact-based drama but facts there are in "Bombshell", a frustratingly superficial look under the rock of America’s foremost right-wing rhetoric factory. "Bombshell" charts the eventual...

Atomic Blonde (2017) Review

Atomic Blonde (2017) Review

Charlize Theron is the bomb in Atomic Blonde. Edgy, brutal and achingly stylish, Charlize Theron’s “Atomic Blonde” should be enough to scare the living daylights out of the Bond producers as they continue to pull together the follow-up to SPECTRE. In cold war 1989 Berlin, in the days...

300: Rise Of An Empire (2014) Review

300: Rise Of An Empire (2014) Review

It's my 300th post, so what better film to review than the appropriately titled 300: Rise Of An Empire? A belated follow-up to 2006’s “300”, this part prequel/ part ‘side-quel’/ sort of sequel by necessity discards much of the principle cast of the first film to focus on events in the...

Le Manoir Du Diable (1896) Review

Le Manoir Du Diable (1896) Review

This is where the fun begins. When you think of the first horror movie, your mind might leap to shadows creeping along walls, gothic castles, or vampires stalking through fog. But if you trace the roots of horror back far enough, you’ll find yourself at the door of The House Of The...