If you’ve seen Smile’s trailer, you’ve seen everything required to get a vivid idea of what the movie has in store. I certainly knew what I was in for when I saw it the first time. It’s a simple premise of a woman being cursed by some malevolent entity with a limited amount of time to find out how to stop it from killing her. If you haven’t seen a movie like this before, I have a recommendation for you instead of watching Smile. Scroll to the end to see what it is.

Pros

Creature design is cool
Decent acting some of the time

Cons

Very unoriginal and uninteresting plot told poorly
Lots of jump scares that are ineffective
Characters are either dull or unlikable
Some acting is pretty bad
Much melodrama

Plot & Thoughts

Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is just the best therapist. It’s established in the first ten minutes that she knows how to reach even the most mentally unstable individuals like no one else and that she is working extra hours to make her hospital a better place. What a saint! Unfortunately for her, just when she’s about the leave for the day, a new patient named Laura (Caitlin Stasey) comes in who is claiming to be haunted by some entity that is going to kill her and, well…the session ends poorly, to say the least. Rose tries to console Laura until a creepy smile comes over Laura’s face and she proceeds to kill herself in front of Rose. Then, the title card and opening credits begin.

Obviously, witnessing a suicide is a horrific and traumatizing event that would shake anyone to their core. Unfortunately for Rose, it only gets worse because, unbeknownst to her, she’s just been cursed by the evil entity for being a witness to Laura’s death. Rose starts seeing and hearing things, doing things she doesn’t realize, waking up in places she doesn’t know how she got to, and becoming more unhinged each day. Everyone around her thinks her odd behavior is just Rose trying to deal with the trauma of witnessing a brutal suicide and they start to think she’s going a little crazy as a result. She has to find out what the curse is and how to stop it before it takes her life too. Also, her sister, brother-in-law, fiance, and therapists are all dicks, but her ex-boyfriend is thankfully nice enough to help her out during this process.

Whenever I watch a movie like this in which there is a curse that affects the main characters, such as Mirrors or It Follows, it’s difficult for me not to compare it to one of the movies I think did it the best: The Ring. So, I usually end up doing just that and I will in this review as well. Smile is, at least, a more coherent film than Mirrors as its rules are better established, but it still doesn’t ever fully realize things in a way that isn’t vague. According to Smile, this entity jumps from victim to victim by possessing someone and killing the host in the form of a suicide in front of the next victim. Simple enough, right? Well, the next victim not only has to witness the act, but they also must have some pre-existing trauma in their life for the spirit to be able to exploit. I imagine this rule was added to justify why it isn’t just going from one person to the next killing people left and right. Apparently, there is a way to stop the entity, as Rose eventually finds someone who survived and is able to get some information out of them, but the reasoning behind that rule also feels a little clunky.

Smile is neither a good movie nor an original one. Everything about it feels like something that was done before and better in other films. The best example that I’ve seen is The Ring because, in the first thirty minutes, that movie manages to establish its relatively simple rules, a ticking clock for the protagonist’s agency, and a mystery to solve with death as a motivating factor. We hear about the curse of the videotape and how long it takes to kill you in the opening scene of The Ring, which is then proven to be true before we meet the main character, Rachel. She’s given a personal reason to look into the tape and what happened to the first victim of the film, setting up the mystery for her to solve. Rachel then watches the tape, which curses her and establishes the ticking clock to push the plot along.

Smile does not set up the mystery or ticking clock early in the film. Instead, it meanders. Rose doesn’t start looking into the curse until multiple days have passed and several strange things have already happened to her, which is more than halfway through the movie. When she finally consulted her ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner)—who happens to be a detective with extremely convenient resources for solving a mystery—it felt like the final act had already begun when the mystery of the entity was just getting started. It’s only after Rose talks to Joel that we’re given something of a ticking clock, which is still very vague of “no one has lasted longer than four days.”

So, you might be asking about what does happen before Smile finally decides to have a plot. Mostly just jump scares, loud noises, and creepy visions. I have a lot of trouble remembering what happens in the first half of Smile other than Rose having to interact with the royal dickheads called her loved ones. Her fiance is a wimp. Her sister is a self-absorbed idiot. And her brother-in-law is a cuck who licks her sister’s shoes. The scenes involving these other characters are either dull or frustrating to watch for several reasons, including the fact that they’re all so unlikable.

Certain scenes in particular are shot in a way that do the actors no favors in terms of adding drama to the scene. The way a scene is framed can do a lot to help or hinder a performance, so when the camera is positioned low to the ground to the side of the characters and we can only see their profiles as they interact with each other, it makes the actors look like they’re, well, acting. In other words, they don’t look like characters anymore and just look like people who memorized some lines. There are several moments in which Rose interacts with her sister or fiance with the odd camera angle that completely removes the drama and makes the scene feel pointless. I think Sosie Bacon is trying hard in this movie, but some of the other actors are pretty flat. When you position the view far away from the actors, you’re removing a lot of the emotion and intensity of a scene, making flat performances even worse. It’s perplexing that the director chose to use this angle so often when there are other scenes in which we’re close up on Sosie Bacon’s face as she’s quietly crying, which is a lot more compelling.

Smile isn’t completely devoid of drama, however. There are also plenty of moments in which the actors are trying a little too hard, like the scene in which Rose finds the one person who survived the curse. It goes from being a relatively quiet scene to being very over the top and involving lots of screaming. At one point, Rose has a vision involving someone she knows and the entity speaks to her directly through this person with a demonic voice and it just made me laugh. It wasn’t like a simple “Seven days” but full sentences about her impending death. The more the creature talked, the less scary it became. The only point in the entity’s favor is that when it is finally revealed, it is a cool design. It’s not cool enough to make it scary or make up for the lack of interest elsewhere, but I’ll still give it a nod for looking interesting.

TL;DR

Smile is a dull movie that tells the same story plenty of other horror movies have told better and more efficiently. Had the script been reworked, it could have been a more interesting mystery to move the story along and build up the curse that is coming to kill its protagonist. Instead, we get a two-hour film that meanders with jump scares during its first half and crams in a mystery and a set of rules for its curse in the second half before abruptly wrapping up. Watch The Ring instead.

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