Content warning: This review contains mentions of self-harm.
Say cheese! Paramount Pictures’ “Smile,” released in theaters Sept. 30, is the perfect bone-chilling blockbuster to kick off the spooky season.
Parker Finn’s directorial debut will have you leaving the theater in a trance — which is precisely why you should get your hands on a ticket to see it on the big screen before it’s gone. I would say you won’t regret it, but as you get into bed for the night, you might wish you’d watched a different movie as the fear sets in and the goosebumps begin to spread.
“Smile” opens with a horrifying and disorienting shot as the frame slowly spins around the macabre image of a dead woman lying on a tattered mattress, clearly the victim of an overdose. The camera slowly turns around to reveal a young girl staring in a state of trauma-induced horror.
Before the unnamed girl even has a chance to blink, the next scene begins, and we meet our protagonist Rose (Sosie Bacon), a psychologist at an emergency psychiatric facility. Her patient, Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) talks of an entity that follows her. “It wears people’s faces like masks,” she says. “And it … smiles at me. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” The situation quickly escalates and Rose finds herself watching powerless as an unnaturally smiling Weaver kills herself with a shard of glass. Blood splatters the off-white tiled floor like spilled paint. Everything goes silent. Having just witnessed a gruesome suicide, Rose stands in shock as the screen goes black. Five large, neon-red letters fade into view from the blackness: the word SMILE flashes on the screen, accompanied by a deafening noise that sounds like it came straight out of Dante’s seventh layer of hell.
After witnessing the traumatic event in the opening scenes of the film, Rose begins to suspect she is being tormented by the same spirit that haunted Weaver. Things begin to escalate, and Rose is determined to find the truth in the face of a horror that no one else believes in. But will she escape this entity, or will it be too late?
“Smile” rises above the crowd in a sea of modern blockbuster horror movies because of its ingenuity. By no means is the film perfect — the script leaves the viewer wanting at times and the metaphor for the everlasting scars of trauma is thinly-veiled. Still, the film does exactly what it sets out to do: it scares. Bacon’s masterful performance of a regular person tormented by a superhuman malevolent force is at the heart of the film. Her tears and blood-curdling screams are realistic, but perhaps most impressive are her more subtle efforts: the strained smiles she practices in the mirror after a night of no sleep, the deep numbness in her eyes as she reaches her limit and the trembling of her fingers as she desperately searches her mind for an escape. However, Bacon’s performance isn’t all that makes this movie worth seeing. The jumpscares are unexpected, the cinematography is surprisingly and consistently beautiful and the gory special effects are inventive and eye-catching.
The film succeeds chiefly in that it never takes itself too seriously. The “It Follows” of trauma (but not quite as good), “Smile” knows that watchers will settle into their reclinable theater chairs expecting a laughable horror blockbuster with no real fear factor. But, it stuns in its opening minutes and keeps you in fearful paralysis for its entire two-hour runtime. “Smile” is here for a good time, not a long time and it knows as much. The film will terrify middle schoolers at sleepovers and entice some genuine screams out of unsuspecting audiences until it’s gone in the vast expanse of forgotten horror blockbusters. “Smile” is a refreshing take on the modern jumpscare-filled horror film, but it just doesn’t quite have that genre defining edge or biting relevancy to solidify itself as one of the greats. Due to its creativity, the film is a whole lot of fun and better than most of its kind, but nothing more.
Yet “Smile” deserves its fifteen minutes of fame. Watch it —if you dare.
