OUT NOW: Smile

Following a patient’s bizarre death, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is haunted by her experience - or so she thinks.

Her patient had claimed something was tormenting her, something that smiled.

Now Rose has the same problem.

Everywhere she looks, she sees the same smile - a knowing, evil smirk.

And it turns out she is not the only one who has been haunted by this smile… 

This movie is the perfect example of why I do not watch trailers.

The trailer for Smile has played in front of so many movies I have seen recently that it has been cemented onto my brain.

It is a good trailer with some great jump scares and captures the vibe of the movie.

And that is the problem.

The trailer contains all of the best scares.

It does not ruin the movie but - and this is not an insult - Smile is all about the scares.

The acting varies from fine to wooden, there is no subtext and no sense of humour. Smile’s sole purpose is to make the viewer jump, and it succeeds - for a while, at least.

Writer-director Parker Finn knows how to build and pay off tension, but as the movie progresses, it begins to feel like the film is stuck in one setting. While the scares are strong, there is a building sense of familiarity - like the film only knows one type of joke delivery. 

Because of this, the movie loses steam about 20-30 minutes from the ending, and I left the movie vaguely deflated.

The movie tries to give the main character an arc, but then undercuts it with a last-minute (but predictable) twist of the knife. The character development is pretty clear, and the movie does not overburden its running time, but there was something a bit too rote about her traumatic backstory and how it is 'resolved'.

Its biggest stumbling block is its narrative resolution - the movie was based on the writer-director’s own short story, and it feels like the concept has been extended so far it undermines the story’s sting. And the ‘twist’ at the end is such a cliche at this point that it makes the movie feel predictable - there is something conceptually interesting about providing a clear button and then destroying it, but the execution lacks the simple, nasty punch of the rest of the movie's scares.

While the story leaves a lot to be desired, the movie feels like the kind of genre movie Stephen King wrote about in Danse Macabre: it might not be wholly successful but Smile sticks in the mind thanks to strong selection of scary moments and unsettling images.

The film is built on such a simple, uncanny concept - a visual concept - that it is a pity that it does not quite make the landing as a feature.