"Smile" more than unsettles as sneakily effective nightmare fuel

Smile (2022)

When you consume a lot of horror movies, a new one can sometimes feel secondhand. In concept, “Smile” owes a little credit to “It Follows” and “The Ring,” but no, this is not “Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare” all over again. Like the former, there’s a contagious chain-letter approach taken by the unknown entity’s death curse, and like the latter, there’s a rough countdown until one’s number is up. Those similarities aside don’t stop writer-director Parker Finn’s debut feature (based on his 2020 short film “Laura Hasn’t Slept”) from being fiendish and sneakily effective nightmare fuel.

Clinical psychiatrist Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) has been working eighty-hour weeks at the hospital. Just as she’s about to go home, she sees a distraught patient, Laura (Caitlin Stasey). The young woman claims she’s being followed by some kind of malevolent entity in different peoples’ bodies, all of them staring at her with a creepy smile. Laura ends up seeing the force in the room, smiling herself, and then killing herself. Rose is understandably beside herself with her nerves shot and some post-traumatic stress, and not long after, she herself begins seeing the smile.

Using the stigmas of mental health and the horror genre’s recent favorite exploratory idea *trauma* as its backbone, “Smile” is disconcerting. There’s still a sense of fun to being scared, but this is not merely a safely familiar jump-scare generator. Directing with a sinister relish, first-timer Parker Finn puts us on edge and leaves us there. The film is well-paced and precisely crafted, driven by Charlie Sarnoff’s (2020’s “Relic”) masterfully dynamic camerawork that goes topsy-turvy more than once, and an unsettling sound design and Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score. There may be a scare every fifteen minutes or so, even between scene transitions, but Finn achieves several socko jolts that feel well-earned and are executed with control. He has such a handle on tone and mood that no moment ever eludes him or careens into silliness.

As noteworthy as Toni Collette’s nuanced lead performance in “Hereditary,” Sosie Bacon (TV's "Mare of Easttown") is outstanding. As Rose, she is the emotional anchor, pulling us into this health professional’s world and keeping us involved as she battles her own emotional wounds and overwhelming anxiety to an exhausting degree. Bacon throws herself into a marathon of emotions that we never have difficulty believing the huge toll this curse has taken on Rose. The rest of the cast elevates their pretty functional roles, including Kyle Gallner, as Joel, Rose’s ex and the police detective assigned to Laura’s case; Gillian Zinser, as Rose’s self-involved older sister Holly; Kal Penn, as Rose’s superior; and Robin Weigert, as Rose’s own therapist. The only weak link here is Jessie T. Usher, who’s outmatched next to Bacon. It does him no favors that fiancé Trevor is written so unreasonably, even by the standards of horror-movie boyfriends and husbands. 

“Smile” confronts its ideas head-on without losing sight of the characters we’re following and not without moments of levity that actually earn a smile or chuckle. In a few amusing details, smiles not only turn up on people’s faces but on a coffee mug and on the hospital’s pain assessment scale. Even the film’s title card appears with a flashing-camera quality. The film consistently rattles and unnerves, right down to the climax where Rose must find catharsis with her own childhood trauma to hopefully end the curse. When we get there, other movies come to mind but never turn the film into a copy-and-paste of spare parts. There are two hair-raising images of trauma manifesting itself that are right out of “The Return of the Living Dead” and “It: Chapter Two," albeit part of a new nightmare. The resolution also boldly takes an uncompromising out, similar to “Lights Out,” that could rub viewers the wrong way, and not unlike the recent “Barbarian,” this film ends on a cheerful song choice as well. Getting under the skin, “Smile” does for a Joker-wide grin what “The Ring” did for mysterious videotapes.

Grade: B +

Paramount Pictures is releasing “Smile” (115 min.) in theaters on September 30, 2022.