After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, Dr. Rose Cotter starts experiencing frightening occurrences that she can’t explain. Rose must confront her troubling past to survive and escape her horrifying new reality.
Parker Finn struck filmmaker gold when his short film won SXSW in 2020. Unfortunately, no one was around to watch since the global pandemic shut down the infamous event and forced everyone to stay at home. Now, two years since he created a feature film using the same ideas as his short film with distribution by Paramount studios in a bid to showcase new, original horror. “Smile,” with its powerful lead performance by Sosie Bacon, finds new ways to terrify audiences leaning heavily on a spine-tingling soundtrack, vicious brutality, and a jaw-dropping final monster that crawled into my brain and wouldn’t let me go to sleep.
Sosie Bacon plays Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist at an emergency treatment facility. She works herself to death to avoid a childhood trauma. One day Rose gets a patient who claims she’s ‘seeing something. Not human, but it wears human faces.’ When her patient kills herself right in front of her, Rose gets the feeling the haunting might be real, and it might be haunting her. As Rose recounts her haunting to those closest to her, everyone suspects she’s lost her mind and tries to get her to lie still for just one minute. Rose has to fight clear of her friends and family while investigating this mass suicide event as she counts down the days until the Smiling Monster comes for her.
A smile turns darkly chilling for us when we watch this movie. Multiple iterations hang on hospital walls, pain charts, and childhood books. The premise never offers too much as far as lore, instead focusing on the chilling frights.
The movie’s scariest moments come in jump scares. Finn proves adept at stretching out our anticipation of a jumpscare by making us wait ever-so-slightly-too-long. He creates dream sequences or hallucinations for Rose that entertain violent events without making them plot and so gets to have his bloodletting without dragging from the plot too much. They’re great scares! One moment, in particular, made me jump out of my seat.
Bacon carries this film on her back, and it’s an impressive turn as a horror lead. Her tightly-wound psychiatrist unravels throughout the film, but Sosie makes us believe it. She goes from a clinical detachment to confused to jittery to tortured to outright shocked throughout the film. For Bacon to track where her character’s at in the movie (given it was not shot chronologically) is a feat of heroics purely from an intellectual standpoint. She nails all the moments of utter shock, even selling a terrific beat of falling through a glass coffee table and shrieking in confused agony.
Much of this film centers around trauma and mental health professionals. While no movie’s depiction of therapy seems to hit the mark, this movie misses its mark, despite treatment being a literal plot mechanic. It’s a bit upsetting to see trauma counseling dismissed outright as ineffective (when some counseling might have saved someone’s life in this movie). Therapists often ask leading questions in this movie or wound the protagonist’s sense of self by deriding their remarks as nonsense. For a film with so much messaging about trauma, it doesn’t believe there’s a way to heal from it.
“Smile” comes on strong in its earliest moments. There are comedy beats, but they’re sparsely woven into a tense story. The last thirty minutes of the film dive sharply into the haunting Rose experiences and jack up the scares with some genuinely awful monster effects. With some impressively choreographed fight scenes and intense combat, that last sequence stuck out in my head. The design of the central monster unpeels before us at various times, making it more and more terrifying with each new iteration.
This movie’s messaging might be bleak towards mental health and trauma, but it sticks the landing on its scariest beats. Sosie Bacon anchors the film with her slowly unhinged performance. The monster’s design and effects are impressively crafted and revealed to us in a shocking thirty-minute finale. I’d recommend it to horror fans and people who want one good scare. There’s guaranteed to be something delectable in there for you all.
“Smile” recently had its World Premiere at the 2022 Fantastic Fest and is now playing in theaters nationwide
