SMILE (2022)

Studio:     Paramount
Director:    Parker Finn
Writer:     Parker Finn
Producer:  Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Robert Salerno
Stars:     Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan, Judy Reyes, Gillian Zinser

Review Score:

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Summary:

After witnessing a shocking suicide, a traumatized therapist becomes the next target of a mysterious curse.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Dr. Rose Cotter, a therapist who was traumatized by witnessing her mother’s suicide at age 10, takes an emergency session with graduate student Laura Weaver after she is admitted to Mount Pleasant Hospital. Laura, who witnessed her professor Gabriel Munoz bludgeon himself with a hammer just a few days earlier, frantically claims she is being haunted by a malevolent presence whose curse has consumed her life and no one but her can see. Although Rose diagnoses her as having hallucinations, Laura insists that the entity has the power to appear as other people wearing an eerie smile. Claiming she is about to die, Laura suddenly freaks out, then begins smiling ominously before cutting open her neck with a broken vase shard in front of Rose.

One of the detectives who interviews Rose about Laura’s death turns out to be her ex-boyfriend Joel. Still shaken by what she saw, Rose recounts what Laura told her about supposedly being cursed by an evil presence with a haunting smile.

Rose begins seeing Laura smiling at her in various places. The visions inspire Rose to look into Gabriel Munoz’s suicide and she learns Gabriel was also smiling strangely immediately before he died.

Rose checks on her patient Carl Ranken, who was previously admitted to the hospital for a manic episode. Carl smiles ominously and begins threatening and terrifying Rose, which causes her to call security. Orderlies restrain Carl, but it turns out Rose only imagined his aggressive behavior. Believing that Laura’s shocking death may have caused a mental breakdown, Rose’s boss Dr. Morgan Desai puts Rose on one week’s leave.

Following another frightening vision of Laura, the security alarm goes off while Rose is home alone. An operator from the security service seemingly calls Rose with a taunting message. The real operator calls Rose shortly thereafter. After her fiancé Trevor returns home, Rose notices her cat is missing.

Trevor has to calm Rose when she becomes suddenly spooked again while reviewing audio from her session with Laura. Concerned for own mental health, Rose visits her former therapist Dr. Madeline Northcott. Rose explains she is having hallucinations, which Madeline attributes to Rose’s longstanding guilt over her mother’s intentional overdose. Madeline denies Rose’s request to prescribe anti-psychotic medication.

Rose and Trevor attend a birthday party for Rose’s seven-year-old nephew Jackson at Rose’s sister Holly’s house. Guests are mortified when Jackson opens Rose’s gift to find her dead cat packaged inside. Vehemently insisting she isn’t responsible, Rose trips and falls through a glass table after another vision of Laura terrifies her.

With her sanity unraveling, Rose tries to tell Trevor about the supposed curse that plagued Laura apparently being passed on to her. Trevor dismissively accuses Rose of inheriting mental illness from her mother and of killing their cat.

Rose visits Gabriel Munoz’s widow Victoria. Victoria shows Rose macabre sketches Gabriel drew of a dark entity he claimed was trying to get inside him. Rose also learns Gabriel was traumatized by the death of his brother 20 years ago, and he began ranting about the curse after attending a conference where he saw a woman kill herself. Rose asks for the woman’s name, but Victoria kicks Rose out of her house after Rose becomes insistent that Gabriel was telling the truth about his curse.

Rose convinces Joel to help her continue connecting clues. Joel uses his police computer to access a file for Angela Powell, who was the real estate agent that Gabriel Munoz saw die. Additional video shows that, several days prior to her death, Angela saw a smiling man suddenly hack his own neck with gardening shears at a gas station.

Rose returns home to find that Trevor called Madeline for an intervention over Rose’s worrying mental state. Feeling betrayed, Rose storms out to take copies of Joel’s files to her sister Holly. Rose tries telling Holly about the curse, which only leads to the sisters arguing about Rose behaving similarly to their abusive mother.

Joel calls Rose to tell her that further digging revealed a chain of 20 similar cases involving witnesses to 19 suicides. The exception was accountant Robert Talley, who watched his business partner commit suicide. Instead of subsequently killing himself, however, Robert murdered a stranger four days later. One week after that, the eyewitness to Robert’s actions committed suicide and the pattern resumed.

Joel takes Rose to see Robert Talley in jail. During the drive, Rose tells a disbelieving Joel that she thinks the entity possesses people before they kill themselves and she worries her time with the curse is almost up.

At the jail, Robert privately reveals to Rose that the only way to break the curse’s chain is to kill someone else, but there has to be a witness because the entity needs trauma to continue surviving. Robert suddenly panics when he realizes Rose currently carries the curse.

Madeline visits Rose back at home. Rose realizes the presence is impersonating Madeline when the real Madeline calls her on the phone. Madeline’s smiling doppelganger threatens Rose.

Armed with a kitchen knife, Rose drives to the hospital. Rose experiences a vision of stabbing her patient Carl to death in front of Dr. Desai, who then tears off his own face. The real Dr. Desai finds Rose in her car with the knife and he tries to summon help before she hurriedly drives away.

Joel calls to tell Rose there is an APB out for her based on the encounter with her concerned boss at the hospital. Rose cryptically explains that she is going to confront the entity and wants to be alone so no witnesses can inherit the curse.

Rose drives to her abandoned childhood home where her mother died. Inside, Rose confronts a vision of her mother, who accuses Rose of allowing her to die by not calling for help upon finding her overdosing. Rose accuses her mother of being an abusive monster. The vision then morphs into a lanky creature that attacks Rose.

Rose sets the creature on fire using an oil lantern. Rose then escapes outside as the entire house goes up in flames.

Rose visits Joel to apologize for involving him in this situation and for not being emotionally available during their relationship. Rose realizes she is still cursed when Joel smiles eerily. Rose flees outside to discover she never actually left her intact childhood home.

The real Joel arrives at the abandoned house. To protect him, Rose locks Joel outside while the creature pulls open her mouth and crawls inside of her. Joel breaks into the house in time to see Rose set herself on fire while smiling ominously.

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Review:

Seeing someone commit suicide can inflict traumatic psychological damage, and Dr. Rose Cotter has had the misfortune of witnessing two. The first happened at age ten, when Rose walked in on her mother in the midst of an intentional overdose. The second happened in the hospital where Rose currently works as a therapist, and this experience promises to haunt her head in ways not even her profession has prepared her for.

Granted an emergency session with Rose, graduate student Laura Weaver ran in ranting about a malevolent entity only she can see. Supposedly, this paranormal presence has the power to look like people sporting strange smiles maniacal enough to make the Joker jealous. Laura claims it’s going to kill her, just like it did her professor, whom she watched bludgeon himself with a hammer just a few days earlier. Rose barely has a moment to diagnose Laura with hallucinations when the frightened young woman suddenly shrieks, then smiles, then calmly cuts open her throat with a broken vase shard.

Watching a woman slaughter herself in such a gruesome manner is awful enough. What happens next gets even worse.

Rose learns soon enough that Laura’s ravings were indeed real. The next victim of a curse that’s attracted to trauma, Rose has unwittingly become the next link in a chain of torment determined to unravel her mind before ultimately driving her to take her own life. Rose now has seven days to give the videotape, er, to figure out how to prevent suffering a suicidal fate, if the terrifying visions she also inherited don’t destroy her entire life along the way.

“Smile” gets more “right” than it gets “wrong,” so lets start with what’s “good.” A list of the movie’s perks begins with Sosie Bacon’s performance in the top spot. Bacon wears worried weariness with an exceptional ability for showing how excruciating stress keeps Rose increasingly rattled. Not only that, Bacon excels at extracting sympathy for Rose’s continued crises of desperately wanting someone, anyone, to believe her.

Any discussion about “Smile” between two people who’ve seen it must include one of them asking, “Can you imagine being at that birthday party?” The film features a particular scene certain to sear into the audience’s memory for a number of reasons. One of them is the wickedly sinister suggestion of a gaggle of seven-year-olds suddenly about to be signed up for a decade of therapy. Another is Bacon delivering perhaps her most frenzied piece of acting anywhere in the film. Watching Rose helplessly realize she’s inside a manipulative hellscape no one else believes is heartbreaking, then the moment becomes alternately hilarious when Rose spontaneously tumbles through a glass table.

That vaguely vicious sense of humor gives “Smile” part of its personality. Another part comes from how writer/director Parker Finn visualizes eeriness through atmosphere. A gloomy grey color palette combined with intermittent establishing shots that swirl skylines upside down mirrors the sense of inescapable unsettledness plaguing Rose. The camera also conspicuously places shadowed doorways in backgrounds to maintain a macabre mood that hints at horrors hiding in unseen corners.

What’s not so hot? “Smile” runs ten minutes shy of two hours, which doesn’t even include credits, and that’s simply too long for a familiar, formulaic “follow the curse” thriller extended from a short film. We all know where this trail leads, and all the stops along the way, too. Struggling to be taken seriously, especially by a disbelieving husband (or fiancé in this case). Connecting dots from online research, interviewing a victim’s loved one, and acquiring a final round of exposition from someone in an asylum (or prison in this case). “Smile” takes a long route to steer us where we’ve already been before, and looking longingly out the window from a cramped backseat turns into a distraction.

It’s additionally difficult to become swallowed up by the movie because it’s not built with rich fiction in mind. Heavily reliant on traditional jump scares, “Smile’s” creepiness is constructed for making viewers grab a companion’s arm with a gasp and giggling about it afterward.

Those who want shocking twists or revelatory explanations to rationalize the movie’s thin mythology will be sorely disappointed, probably even frustrated, to discover “Smile” doesn’t offer answers to questions about its curse. Not that it helps those viewers now, but “Smile’s” big box office success assures there will eventually be a sequel, and Parker Finn may have no choice but to expand on the lore, or perhaps create it since that story doesn’t seem like it already exists. Here’s hoping Finn also adds extra substance (like a narratively useful fiancé character), and subtracts some of the meandering minutes, to make “Smile 2” a more resonant experience.

Review Score: 60

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