SMILE. (2022) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

SMILE. (2022) WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY PARKER FINN. BASED ON HIS SHORT FILM FROM 2020, ‘LAURA HASN’T SLEPT.’

STARRING SOSIE BACON, KYLE GALLNER AND CAITLIN STASEY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

If someone smiles at you in a nice normal way, it can make you feel good. It can even make your day. But an evil grinning smile can scare the living daylights out of you. If I was ever visited by an entity, God forbid, I’d prefer it to be wearing a standard scowly demonic expression than a creepy smile. A creepy smile can really put the willies up you.

SMILE, the big horror hit from last Halloween, is full of creepy smiles. I knew just by looking at the poster of the evil smiling girl that it was going to scare me because I react to evil smiles in a very primal kind of way, like most of us would probably do. And, in fact, it did scare the Christ out of me and put me in mind of the only other modern horror film I’ve seen that scares me this much… IT FOLLOWS, which is like SMILE with sex thrown in, haha.

SMILE features actor Kevin Bacon’s daughter Sosie in the lead role. She plays Dr. Rose Cotter, a therapist on the psychiatric ward of an American hospital. Her first patient of the film is a young woman called Laura Weaver, who’s played by Caitlin Stasey, the actress who portrays Laura in the short horror film that inspired this hit, LAURA HASN’T SLEPT. If you purchased the DVD of SMILE, it should have the terrific short film on there as an extra feature.

Laura is distraught. Just recently, she’s witnessed her art history professor committing suicide in front of her. Well…! That’d be disturbing in any language. The horror of it doesn’t end there, however.

Since the suicide, an entity only Laura can see has been following her around, telling her she’s going to die. It can change shape and take the form of someone she knows, a terrifying thought, but, whichever one appears, they’ll all be smiling eerily… How messed-up is that?

What Laura does next, and in front of her shrink to boot, ensures that the horrible curse is passed onto an unwilling Rose, who will spend the rest of the movie trying to escape it.

Here, the movie is similar to both IT FOLLOWS and THE RING, as they each feature curses that can be gotten rid of if you can only find someone to pass them on to. It’s very unfortunate for the poor sod who gets lumbered with the curse, but it’s every man for him or herself when it comes to evil curses.

Rose becomes more and more frightened as she learns that, as long as this entity is lurking about, she can’t trust anyone she knows. It could take the form of her sister, Holly, her own therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott, her complete non-ENTITY of a boyfriend, Trevor (you see what I did there?), who might as well not be in the film at all, her boss at the hospital, Dr. Desai, or even any one of her psychiatric patients. She doesn’t know where to turn for comfort or advice.

Her therapist, Dr. Northcott, thinks that the key to the haunting of Rose lies buried in long-past trauma. When we discover- through disturbing flashbacks- what has happened to poor Rose in her childhood, it seems to make a kind of grisly sense that Rose should be targeted by this particular hideous evil entity.

She still wants rid of it, though, so that’s the next step- facing up to this uppity entity and kicking it into touch once and for all. The final scenes are pretty scary, as the villains make their faces known and Rose can barely distinguish what’s real from what’s diabolically fake.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t see this film on the big screen last year; it might actually have been too much for me, lol. The ending also puts me in mind of the grotesque denoument scenes of acclaimed horror flick, AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION (1982). This is one of the scariest movies of all time for me, this and THE CHANGELING (1980).

You could also include THE FLY, a petrifying body horror from 1986, amongst the movies with quite possibly enough bodily gore and violence in them to match up to SMILE. It’s a good scary story, well told visually, and they’re talking about a sequel as well.

That’s good news for people like me who love to see horror films in which something truly blood-curdling is hoofing it towards an unwitting human being, smartish-like. It’s nice to see a successful, full-length movie being made out of a short film, as well.

There’s great source material in some of the short films being made today, so let’s keep mining that valuable vein of gold. And let’s hope they don’t take too long to pull any sequels together. My patience only stretches so far, and ditto my widely smiling mouth…