Smile (2022) poster

Smile (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Parker Finn, Producers – Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner & Robert Salerno, Photography – Charlie Sarroff, Music – Cristobal Tapia de Veer, Visual Effects Supervisors –Yuyai Levy & Vico Sharabani, Visual Effects – The Artery & Post Mango FX (Supervisor – Stephen Siemens), Special Effects Supervisor – Eugene Hitt, Makeup Effects – Amalgamated Dynamics (Created/Designed by Alec Gillis & Tom Woordruff, Jr.), Production Design – Lester Cohen. Production Company – Temple Hill.

Cast

Sosie Bacon (Rose Cotter), Kyle Gallner (Joel), Jessie T. Usher (Trevor), Robin Weigert (Dr Robin Northcott), Kal Penn (Dr Morgan Desai), Caitlin Stasey (Laura Weaver), Gillian Zinser (Holly), Jack Sochet (Carl Renkin), Rob Morgan (Robert Talley), Judy Reyes (Victoria Muñoz), Nick Apapoglou (Greg), Perry Strong (Detective Buckley)


Plot

Rose Cotter, a junior therapist at Mount Pleasant hospital, receives a new patient with PhD student Laura Weaver. Laura has become disturbed after her professor went crazy and attacked people. Laura claims that she is being haunted, seeing people with sinister smiles on their faces everywhere. As Rose watches, Laura says that one of the smiling people is in the room before abruptly slitting her throat, Afterwards, Rose is haunted by the incident. In short course, she too starts seeing people with sinister smiles on their faces. The blur of reality and illusion causes her to become fearful and starts making those around her think she is going crazy. As Rose digs, she comes to believe she is being haunted by an entity that is passed between people and wears them down to commit suicide.


Smile is a promising directing/writing debut for newcomer director Parker Finn. Finn had previously made the basics of Smile as the eleven-minute short film Laura Hasn’t Slept (2020), which stars Caitlin Stasey as a patient seeking psychiatric help of a psychologist because she is haunted. (The original short film can be found here at YouTube). The short received funding to be expanded out to feature-length from Temple Hill, the production company behind the Twilight and The Maze Runner films, among others.

The whole concept has been expanded between short and feature film. Caitlin Stasey repeats essentially the same role here. The original film is a fairly uncomplicated work of Dream Horrors that came with a sting in its tale. In its expansion, it is no longer about dream horrors so much as about an entity that causes Reality and Illusion to blur. Lew Temple’s psychologist from the short is replaced by Sosie Bacon who now becomes the central character, while Caitlin Stasey’s talk with the psychologist now becomes the fulcrum event that kicks off the rest of the story in which Sosie is haunted.

The idea of the curse that virally infects people reminds a good deal of It Follows (2014), which had Maika Monroe haunted by an entity that is passed by sexual contact and then invades the dream life of people, taking on the appearance of others. The concept of the virally spread curse goes back to the various Japanese Ring and Ju-on/The Grudge films during the early 2000s. Just before watching Smile, I also saw the extremely impressive The Harbinger (2022) about a viral dream-intruding demonic entity that causes people’s entire existences to be wiped out.

A haunted Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) in Smile (2022)
A haunted Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon)
Caitlin Stasey in Smile (2022)
A smile-possessed Caitlin Stasey

The scene where Caitlin Stasey slashes her throat in front of Sosie Bacon wakes the film up with an undeniable jolt. Thereafter, Parker Finn does an admirable job in creating a sense of dread about what is about to happen, aided in no small way by the loud ominousness of the soundtrack. I had a certain negative anticipation that this would just be a film where everywhere Sosie Bacon went she would see people turning and sinisterly smiling at her but Parker Finn is spare with this effect.

The far greater effect Finn gets is the reality-blurring scenes like Sosie Bacon thinking the security company is calling her before the person on the end of the phone urges her to turn and look behind her, or when therapist Robin Weigert pays her a home visit, before all of these are joltingly twisted around to reveal they are part of the illusion. The most way out of these is when Sosie walks away from sister Gillian Zinser’s place after an argument and Gillian comes out of the house to knock on the window of the car, before her head abruptly falls down on the end of a stalk. All of this promises well for Parker Finn as a director.

Sosie Bacon is the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick and a name who has begun to gain notice in the last few years. Initially here she comes across as a colourless character – not to mention someone who looks as though their BMI is well below what it should be. The character would have felt more relatable if Sosie had seemed more vivacious and full of life in the initial scenes rather than started out seeming tense and troubled. That said, Sosie’s descent into madness, especially as everyone around her starts thinking she is going crazy as she tries to get them to take what is happening to her seriously, works with a reasonable conviction. The other amusement of the film is the realisation that her fiancé is played by Jessie T. Usher, none other than A-Train on tv’s The Boys (2019- ).


Trailer here


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