smile movie review guardian

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Smile review – grin and bear it in this queasy, nasty horror melodrama

A psychiatrist fleeing her own trauma discovers a grisly, self-replicating chain of destruction

I f you’ve ever had this word addressed to you as an instruction, followed up with “… it may never happen!” you already know how grotesquely unnatural smiling is if you don’t feel like it. It’s much more difficult than pouting when you’re happy, a skull-grimace of misery, betraying the heartbreak within. Incidentally, I lost a bet with myself as to which Nat King Cole song would be ironically played over this film’s closing credits.

Smile is a queasy, nasty horror-melodrama from first time feature director Parker Finn. Like David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows , this takes an indirect inspiration from the MR James short story Casting the Runes , all about an unending DNA-replication of evil. It’s shot in a dull, blank, subdued light into which hallucinations and supernatural incursions can insinuate themselves without warning, together with unsubtly brutal but effective jump scares.

Sosie Bacon (daughter of Kevin) plays Dr Rose Cotter, a consultant psychiatrist who has chosen to work in the most challenging environment possible: a hospital ER in which patients are invariably at their most violent and troubled. This is Rose’s vocation, stemming from a trauma in her own childhood, which she has effectively suppressed with elaborate professional calm. She is now engaged to a handsome young guy called Trevor (Jessie T Usher), having somewhat heartlessly broken off a relationship with Joel (Kyle Gallner), a cop who through a strange quirk of fate is called to attend when Rose faces the most terrifying case of her life. A deeply disturbed young woman is brought in, wretched with fear and lack of sleep, telling Rose about a hideously smiling demon that stalks her, inhabiting the bodies of various people: some are friends, some are random strangers. And then with a grisly self-destructive flourish, the awful smile itself breaks cover, and Rose realises that it is coming to get her too, and she faces a terrible choice if she wants to escape its curse.

Smile is a movie whose influences are certainly detectable: we are, admittedly, close to Scary Movie territory, when we get closeups of the home-security-system keypad on the wall of Rose’s luxurious home, or scenes with her adorable pet, or horrible situations which turn out to be dreams from which the heroine awakens with an explosive gasp. But there is also something arresting about the central, nauseous motif. You see someone taking their own life and are from then on pursued by this grotesque, horrible smile. People who have witnessed something so intimately despairing and horrible have become somehow implicated without their consent in the most violent dysfunction and may indeed spend the rest of their lives toughing it out, smiling through their repressed pain. Yet this buried agony may well manifest itself in carrying on the chain letter of evil: being violent or self-harming with someone else. The movie is a shard of comic and cosmic spite, and the image of the malign smile carries force. Apart from MR James, I found myself thinking of the Kafkaesque short story that Billy Wilder wrote while working as a journalist in Berlin in the 1920s called Wanted: Perfect Optimist , about a man who gets a job in which all he has to do is sit in the office and smile continuously for eight hours a day; it soon becomes an existential ordeal of horror. As for this film, I found myself sheepishly grinning for some time afterwards.

Smile is released on 28 September in the UK, 29 September in Australia and 30 September in the US.

• Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
• Horror films

Most viewed

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Pick

‘Smile’ Review: Grab and Grin

A young psychiatrist believes she’s being pursued by a malevolent force in this impressive horror feature debut.

• Share full article

By Jeannette Catsoulis

A relentlessly somber, precision-tooled picture whose frights only reinforce the wit of its premise, “Smile” turns our most recognizable sign of pleasure into a terrifying rictus of pain.

And pain is something that Rose (Sosie Bacon), a young clinical psychiatrist, understands, having witnessed her mother’s suicide many years earlier. So when a hysterical patient (Caitlin Stasey) claims that she’s being stalked by a murderous, shape-shifting entity — and that this specter appeared only after she saw an acquaintance brutally kill himself — Rose is immediately empathetic. What happens next is so horrifying it will not only resurrect old terrors but engender new ones, destabilizing Rose and everyone close to her.

Increasingly convinced that she, too, is going to die in some horrible fashion, Rose is plagued by gruesome memories, nightmarish hallucinations and lost stretches of time. Her friends and family — including a distracted sister (Gillian Zinser), distant fiancé (Jessie T. Usher) and concerned supervisor (Kal Penn) — presume psychological damage. Only her ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), a sympathetic police detective, is willing to help her research anyone who might have had a similar experience. And, crucially, survived.

In its thematic use of unprocessed trauma and, especially, its presentation of death as a kind of viral infection passed from one person to another, “Smile” embraces an immediately recognizable horror-movie setup. In the past, this has centered on cursed pieces of technology, like the videotape in “The Ring” (2002 ) and the cellphone in “One Missed Call” (2005) . Here, though, death is dealt simply by witnessing an act, and in that sense the movie’s closest cousin may be David Robert Mitchell’s immensely creepy “It Follows” (2015) . In that film, the malevolent virus was transferred through sex; here, the medium is suicide, and the bloodier the better.

Yet this first feature from the writer and director Parker Finn (expanding his 2020 short film, “Laura Hasn’t Slept”) doesn’t feel like a retread: Even the familiar luckless pet seems included more as a wink-wink to the audience than a lazy crib. The jump scares are shockingly persuasive, gaining considerable oomph from Tom Woodruff Jr.’s imaginative practical effects and Charlie Sarroff’s tipsy camera angles. An unexpected color palette sets a dolorous tone without being suffocatingly gloomy, and Bacon’s performance , both shaky and determined, ensures that the very real agony of mental illness and its stigmatization register as strongly as any supernatural pain. Like the emotional injury they represent, the smiles in “Smile” are — in one case, quite literally — bleeding wounds that can’t be stanched.

Smile Rated R for scary teeth and shocking deaths. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

“X-Men ’97,” a revival on Disney+ that picks up where the ’90s animated series left off, has faced questions after the firing of its showrunner  ahead of the premiere.

“3 Body Problem,” a science fiction epic from the creators of “Game of Thrones,” has arrived on Netflix. We spoke with them about their latest project .

For the past two decades, female presidential candidates on TV have been made in Hillary Clinton’s image. With “The Girls on the Bus,” that’s beginning to change .

“Freaknik,” a new Hulu documentary, delves into the rowdy ’80s and ’90s-era spring festival  that drew hundreds of thousands of Black college students to Atlanta.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

‘Smile’ Review: The Demons Grin Back at You in a Horror Movie With a Highly Effective Creep Factor

A therapist looks like she's losing her mind in a shocker that puts a happy face on trauma.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

• ‘Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s War on Democracy’ Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of a Second Trump Reign 23 hours ago
• Remembering Louis Gossett Jr. in ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’: His Timeless Acting Elevated the Movie Drill Sergeant Into a Mythic Figure 4 days ago
• ‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ Review: A Godzilla Spectacle Minus One Thing: A Reason to Exist 6 days ago

“ Smile ” is a horror film that sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits. In an emergency psych ward, Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ), a diligent and devoted therapist, is speaking to a woman who sounds like her soul went to hell and never made it back. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stasey), and she describes, in tones that remain rational despite her tremulous panic, the visions she’s been seeing that no one else can.

The demons Laura was seeing didn’t die with her. That night, Rose goes home to her big chilly modernist house next to a woods, and after pouring herself a glass of wine and sitting in the semi-darkness, she sees the same thing that Laura saw. A face, shrouded in shadow. The more she looks at it, the more she can see that it’s grinning.

The smile, as a signifier of maniacal fear, goes back a long way. Just think of Jack-’o-lanterns and the Joker, or the leer that flashed across the mottled face of Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil, or the rictus grins in a movie like “Insidious” or the movie that inspired it, the great 1962 low-budget freak-show classic “Carnival of Souls.” In “Smile,” the first-time writer-director Parker Finn, drawing on films like “Hereditary” and “It Follows” and “The Strangers,” turns the human smile into a spooky vector of the shadow world of evil. The movie has a shivery quality that I, for one, thought “Black Phone” lacked. Yet I wish “Smile” were more willing to be…suggestive.

If you’re haunted by visions of people smiling at you, but no one else sees them, the world is going to think you’re crazy, and much of the drama in “Smile” revolves around Rose looking like a therapist who’s lost her mind. Sosie Bacon, who’s like a taut neurasthenic Geneviève Bujold, creates an impressive spectrum of anxiety, tugging the audience into her nightmare. It makes sense that Rose, teaming up with her police-officer ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), turns herself into an investigator, because that’s what therapists are (at least the good ones). And she’s got a primal trauma of her own: the suicide of her mother, which we glimpse in the film’s opening moments. “Smile” lifts, from “Hereditary,” the idea that the emotional and psychological demons that are passed down through families are our own real-life ghosts. But in this case it’s a megaplex metaphor: literal, free of nuance, illustrated (at the climax) with a demon who sheds her skin, all the better to get inside yours.

There’s a good scene set at Rose’s nephew’s seventh birthday party, where the usual tuneless singing of “Happy Birthday” melts the film into a trance, and the kid unwraps a present that stops the party dead in its tracks. But I would have liked to see three more scenes this dramatic — especially in a movie that lasts 115 minutes. “Smile” will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie. (And why is “Lollipop,” the 1958 hit by the Chordettes, played over the closing credits? It’s one of my favorite songs, but it has zero connection to anything in the movie.) Yet let’s give “Smile” credit for taking a deep dive into the metaphysics of smile horror. The nature of a smile is that it draws you into a connection with the person who’s smiling. That’s why the forces who come after Rose are more than just bogeywomen. That’s why it feels like they’re meant for her.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, Sept. 26, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 115 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release, in association with Paramount Players, of a Temple Hill Entertainment production. Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Robert Salerno. Executive producer: Adam Fishbach.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Parker Finn. Camera: Charlie Sarroff. Editor: Eeliott  Greenberg. Music: Cristobal “Christo” Tapia de Veer.
• With: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robert Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan.

More From Our Brands

Meet the singer who replaced scott weiland and chester bennington in stone temple pilots, a beverage maven’s groovy palm springs midcentury hits the market again for $5.2 million, diamond bolsters post-chapter 11 viability with new charter deal, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, ratings: the rookie and will trent tick up, fbi tops tuesday, verify it's you, please log in.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Smile’ Review: Parker Finn’s Supernatural Take on Trauma Will Make You Grimace and Grin

Marisa mirabal.

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Share on LinkedIn
• Show more sharing options
• Submit to Reddit
• Post to Tumblr
• Print This Page
• Share on WhatsApp

The phrase “ smile through the pain” takes on a menacing new meaning in “Smile,” as Parker Finn uses an internationally recognized symbol of happiness to elicit fear and evil as part of the film’s exploration of trauma. A smile is nothing more than a mask, and the real horror arises from the true intention behind it.

Sosie Bacon stars as Rose Cotter, a doctor who works in an emergency psychiatric unit and has carried a heavy burden since she witnessed her mother’s suicide at ten years old. Her mental health begins to deteriorate after she assesses a young woman named Laura (Caitlin Stasey) who is brought in for witnessing a suicide. Frantic and begging for someone to believe her, Laura tells Rose that she is being taunted by a being that only she can see; one that smiles and changes its appearance all while delivering a death threat. She then kills herself right in front of a frozen Rose, who later discovers that whatever entity influenced this patient has now latched itself onto her.

Finn fleshes out Rose’s character with backstories and glimpses into the relationships with her boss, her mother, her fiance, and her older sister. Rose’s emotional turmoil is visually engrossing as a result of Bacon’s impressively frenetic performance. As Rose grapples with disturbing hallucinations and the inability to trust those around her, she fluctuates between moments of mania and disconnection. This spectrum of vulnerable paranoia and fear allows Finn to tackle the multilayered complexity of mental health as Rose attempts to convince those around her that what she is experiencing is real.

While this is a tiresome (although realistic) trope in horror, these rapidly changing emotional states allow Bacon’s acting to shine. Feeling alone, despite the care from her therapist (Robin Weigert), Rose finds a sliver of solace in a police officer and former flame, Joel (Kyle Gallner), who helps her piece together the unsettling lineage of this supernatural being’s victims. While the specifics of the monster are hidden, its execution method and purpose are both revealed within a storyline that is sadly traditional and insipid in its structure.

In order to convey Rose’s mental and emotional downward spiral, Finn utilizes an array of strong camera angles that suggest the lack of consistency in her newfound reality. Slowly rotating the camera ninety degrees, inverting the camera completely upside down, invasive close-up shots on the characters’ faces, and beautiful aerial shots all provide an ominous tone with the eerie feeling of being studied and hunted.

The minimalist production design, courtesy of Lester Cohen, focuses on the horrific mental state of its characters instead of painting a typical horror film aesthetic with gothic or dark features. However, there are certain color palettes that nicely symbolize the instability of Rose’s inner mind and physical surroundings. For example, the hospital where she works dons light pink walls (a nod to an old study that found the shade Bake-Miller Pink to reduce aggression) while Rose often wears blue outfits, a color often representing sadness

The plot of “Smile” is exhaustingly reminiscent of other horror predecessors such as “It Follows,” “The Ring,” “Oculus,” and even “Final Destination.” Finn elaborates on a contagious approach to death by factoring in trauma and how grief and depression can have a ripple effect, but the story does not entirely feel like its own beast. To enhance the film’s already heavily pronounced themes, composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer creates a strong soundscape of playfulness and dread which perfectly compliments the juxtaposition used throughout the film’s 116 minute running time.

The sound design and music are as unnerving as the graphic death scenes, but unfortunately come with excessive amounts of jump scares. And the special effects team from Amalgamated Dynamics constructs truly searing imagery that will both shock and delightfully disgust, especially in the third act. Their grisly prosthetic work and creative monster design have a corporeal surrealism which will have horror fans grinning from ear to ear.

“Smile” navigates unhealed trauma through a supernatural lens and mischievous juxtaposition, despite feeling like a shadow of other stories. With rare moments of dark comedy and irony, he is able to expose the forceful nature of society’s expectation to be happy and presentable despite the suffering that may lurk under one’s skin. Overall, “Smile” delivers a captivating and claustrophobic mental hellscape that will cause one to both grimace and grin.

Paramount will release “Smile” in theaters on Friday, September 30.

Most Popular

You may also like.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Love Lies Bleeding Link to Love Lies Bleeding
• Problemista Link to Problemista
• Late Night with the Devil Link to Late Night with the Devil

New TV Tonight

• Mary & George: Season 1
• Star Trek: Discovery: Season 5
• Sugar: Season 1
• American Horror Story: Season 12
• Loot: Season 2
• Parish: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• Lopez vs Lopez: Season 2
• The Magic Prank Show With Justin Willman: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• The Gentlemen: Season 1
• Palm Royale: Season 1
• Manhunt: Season 1
• X-Men '97: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• We Were the Lucky Ones Link to We Were the Lucky Ones
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Pedro Pascal Movies and Series Ranked by Tomatometer

Dwayne Johnson Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Free Movies Online: 100 Fresh Movies to Watch Online For Free

TV Premiere Dates 2024

• Trending on RT
• Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire
• Play Movie Trivia

Smile Reviews

It's not the most original film of recent years... [but] it uses a familiar box of tricks rather well.

Full Review | Jan 3, 2024

If the sight of a person grinning like an idiot is enough to unnerve you, then you might well be the target audience for Smile -- me, I’ll stick with Jack Nicholson’s Joker for my maniacal grimaces.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 28, 2023

“Smile” works on its own terms immersed with Cotter, wound too tight and with people closest to her turning superficial and nonreciprocating; the care and support she shows them and others is unavailable to her.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

Smile got right under my skin in a way I didn’t expect… anxiety inducing moments, & an a completely unhinged performance from Sosie Bacon! This movie really will make you afraid of smiles

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Smile is nothing revolutionary, but it is creepy, and sometimes that’s enough. It’s more memorable than any recent iteration of Paranormal Activity and will certainly be a hit at sleepovers.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

There were some aspects that were interesting but a lot of moments made me roll my eyes. The last twenty minutes got my attention but it was too little, too late at that point.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 30, 2023

I did not have fun watching this. Relying too much on jump scares and not enough pay-off.

Don’t look away. Just keep smiling through it.

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

Smile shows itself as a strange mixture of goldsmithing and cheap jewelry: the more unconscious it is of its own message and the further it is from giving its monsters a total shape (physical or metaphorical), the closer it is to saying something real.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 25, 2023

... Its formal technique transforms a film full of clichés into an average story that manages to make an impact at the right moments. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 20, 2023

Even with the similarities to other films in mind, Smile proves itself to be its own beast of a horror.

Full Review | Jan 28, 2023

Finn uses the strength of his conceit to turn the screws, raising tension through the Ring-like timeline Rose faces and the sheer relentlessness of her supernatural tormentor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 19, 2022

Building a horror film that feels both familiar and invigorating at the same time, Finn’s Smile delivers enough chills to satisfy.

Full Review | Dec 15, 2022

I watched the entire movie through my fingers. Starring Sosie Bacon her constant panic is operatic. She was terrifying in her out-of-control hysteria.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2022

Smile is an intense horror film dealing with survivor’s guilt that exceeds all expectations. By the film’s end, I found my palms sweating — something I’d never experienced.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 30, 2022

A bone-rattling, brain-flipping chiller sure to be ranked highly by true fans of the genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 30, 2022

We see and hear the stifling moods of fear and frustration Finn can evoke and we wish they weren’t yoked to such a nothing-special story.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Nov 22, 2022

I think I can speak for all of us when I say, no one expected Smile to be quite as good as it turned out to be, but it’s such a joy to watch a truly exciting new horror film on the big screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 19, 2022

Finn is a strong visual director, tilting and pivoting the camera and using shadows, upsetting bits of body horror and distortion effects to generate some potent atmosphere. But he struggles in other ways...

Full Review | Nov 16, 2022

A disturbing and visceral descent into a chilling and tragic nightmare. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Nov 9, 2022

UK Edition Change

• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Paris 2024 Olympics
• Rugby Union
• Sport Videos
• John Rentoul
• Mary Dejevsky
• Andrew Grice
• Sean O’Grady
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Lifestyle Videos
• UK Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• Home & Garden
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events
• Betting Sites
• Online Casinos
• Wine Offers

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

Smile review: A single, creepy grin isn’t enough to sustain an entire horror movie

‘smile’ suffers from never evolving past the basics – that trauma begets trauma and, if left unchecked and unexamined, can consume a person’s life, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our the life cinematic email for free, thanks for signing up to the the life cinematic email.

Dir: Parker Finn. Starring: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T Usher, Kyle Gallner, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan. 18, 115 minutes.

You may have heard of the “Kubrick stare”. It’s a look into camera – head titled down, eyes glistening beneath lowered brows. Stanley Kubrick was always fond of how quickly it could signal man’s descent into madness, and used it to great effect in A Clockwork Orange , The Shining , and Full Metal Jacket . Slap a fish-eating grin on there and you’ve got Smile , the latest example of how a single, effective image isn’t always enough to sustain a feature-length film.

Parker Finn’s 2020 short Laura Hasn’t Slept cleverly exploited the porous divide between reality and dream. A woman (Caitlin Stasey) confesses to her therapist that she’s been keeping herself awake out of fear of the grinning man who visits her in her dreams. In Smile , that visage has been transformed into a literal, supernatural curse – part The Ring , part It Follows . Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is confronted with a patient (a returning Stasey) who was the only witness to her professor’s suicide. She claims that she’s now haunted by some unnamed entity that “wears people’s faces like masks” and has “the worst smile I’ve ever seen in my life”.

When tragedy strikes, Rose initially dismisses these visions as a symptom of acute post-trauma psychosis. Then she sees the smile. Again and again, on different faces. It’s an undeniably frightening sight, which Finn captures in steady, unflinching close-ups – either haloed in light or shimmering in the dark. There are plenty of sudden, and occasionally inventive, frights. The film also sees Rose pour out multiple tiny glasses of wine, seemingly only so she can drop them moments later with a crash.

We know this story well: is Rose losing her mind or is there really something nefarious at work? Finn’s script does make a commendable attempt to call out the stigma around mental illness, where the fullness of a person’s soul is dismissed after a single diagnosis. A cop attempts to close the case on Rose’s patient with a simple: “She was a headcase, yeah?” As we learn, Rose’s own mother died by suicide when she was a child. The trauma she carries with her, and the question of what hereditary illnesses she may have inherited, are held against her by almost everyone in her life: her boss (Kal Penn), her sister (Gillian Zinzer), her fiance Trevor (Jessie T Usher). The only exception is an old ex, cop Joel (Kyle Gallner), who’s mainly there to stand around, confused but empathetic, while Rose delivers various revelations to him.

• Ticket to Paradise review: Julia Roberts and George Clooney’s first romcom together is a screwball joy
• After Yang review: A gentle vision of the near future in which Colin Farrell thrives
• Catherine Called Birdy review: Different century, same Lena Dunham in medieval feminist romp

Rose googles. She combs through old case files. She visits people connected to previous victims. It’s the same procedural process we’ve seen in a hundred other horror films, and the mystery here is self-evident enough that there’s never really anything of note for Rose to discover. Considering every horror film these days seems to be “about trauma”, Smile suffers from never evolving past the basics – that trauma begets trauma and, if left unchecked and unexamined, can consume a person’s life. Can a horror film really build itself around a statement that obvious? It doesn’t feel like adequate justification for something that, really, is just about how good Kubrick was at making movies.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Want an ad-free experience?

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

• My Independent Premium
• Account details
• Help centre

Smile Review: This Super Twisted Jaw-Clincher Is Another 2022 Horror Win

What’s behind this smile.

A smile is an expression that’s all around us constantly, and is supposed to be reassuring: a symbol of happiness. But, sometimes there’s harm in a smile. It can serve as a mask for different feelings going on behind it. Or in the instance of the new horror movie, Smile , it can be the last thing you see before becoming enveloped by something of great darkness. And, once you walk out of writer/director Parker Finn’s seriously ruthless and chilling debut, you might be double taking the grins of passerbys for something a lot more crooked than comforting. 

Ahead of prime horror movie season even beginning, it’s been a massively good year for the genre. Between the return of Jordan Peele for Nope , the unique social commentaries of Fresh and Bodies Bodies Bodies , Ti West’s chilling pair of films X and Pearl , and the return of Scream and Orphan franchises, 2022 has been big. That winning streak continues with Smile , which begins with psychiatrist Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) watches one of her patients kill herself with a massive smile on her face after previously babbling about the unexplainable, unsettling things she’s seen in the past few days. Following the traumatic incident, Rose begins being haunted by terrors she was once warned about. 

Despite some formulaic tendencies, Smile goes hardcore with its horror. 

What many surely imagined would be a more “fun,” absurd horror concept is not what Smile turns out to be. Instead, the movie is an impressive brew of jump-scare horrors of the early 00s and Ari Aster ’s Hereditary . Yes, Smile is an incredibly enjoyable watch, but throughout there’s a merciless tone that will not let the tension break. You’ll need to take a moment to unclench your jaw after this one. 

If you’re a horror fan, you’ve seen something like Smile play out in a movie before, but Parker Finn demonstrates a firm grip on popular genre story devices in an effective way that drains the audience of ease, and it sets the film apart.

While movies with a ton of jump scares have been less popular these days in the horror resurgence, Smile goes for them in some memorable and twisted ways. There are multiple moments in the movie where you know a jump scare is waiting for you, but it feels like Smile always has the upper hand and waits an extra beat to make sure it truly gets you. 

The jump scares work so well because Smile is all about the mind tricks that the evil entity executes. The scares play directly into the plot, and while it’s tapping into how fun it is to jump out of one’s seat in a horror movie, the scares crawl under your skin too. The movie as a whole uses its horror elements to shake the viewer up so much that you’re all tensed up for its even more gruesome, unnerving and moving finale. And the imagery Smile leaves you with is prime nightmare fuel. 

Writer/director Parker Finn’s allegory delivers with a devious grin. 

Smile ’s scares are not simply in the knee-jerk physical reactions it can inspire, as there is also a layered story that can serve as a discussion for the horrors of family trauma and how it creates unfortunate cycles – especially when it comes to mental health struggles. You can certainly choose to take Smile at face value, but those looking to dig into the deeper commentary of the movie can find a lot to unpack. 

As a society, we don’t talk enough about how damaging smiles can be and how they can actually cover up a lot more complex emotions happening under the surface. The ignorance of this leads to a lot of prevalent issues, including suicide (the 12th leading cause of death in the U.S.) The movie examines this in a thought-provoking way by flipping our expectation that a smile is always a good sign by attaching them to the villain of the film. The social commentary at the center of Smile is not only clever, but the concepts are handled with a boldness that doesn't hit on the idea so hard that the horror movie on the surface falters.

Sosie Bacon’s lead performance ties together Smile best. 

Smile could have easily fallen apart if we don’t believe its leading character. Thankfully Sosie Bacon gives a compelling performance as Rose, an introverted psychiatrist who deeply cares about helping others and is haunted by a childhood trauma. Thanks to the movie’s solid script, you really believe why Rose is who she is and the decisions she makes amidst all of the terror that surrounds her. Kyle Gallner is additionally a great right hand to Bacon, playing a police officer who has a past with Rose. 

As Smile builds to its final sequences, the movie has audiences fully rooting for the two and for most importantly, for Rose’s haunting to end without another creepy grin. Parker Finn’s debut not only makes for a strong start to his filmmaking career, but yet another entry into 2022’s rich list of horror wins. 

Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.

The First Omen Director Explains 'Controversial' Scene That Almost Caused An NC-17, And It Includes Full-Frontal Nudity

Ludacris Weighed In On The Fast And Furious Franchise’s Future, And Now I’m Wondering If The Fast X Sequel Will End The Series As Planned

Sam Raimi Has Heard Those Rumors About Making Spider-Man 4 With Tobey Maguire. His Thoughts?

Most Popular

By Mike Reyes February 14, 2024

By Dirk Libbey February 13, 2024

By Sarah El-Mahmoud February 07, 2024

By Mike Reyes January 31, 2024

By Riley Utley January 26, 2024

By Eric Eisenberg January 10, 2024

By Corey Chichizola January 10, 2024

By Mike Reyes January 05, 2024

By Eric Eisenberg January 04, 2024

By Eric Eisenberg December 21, 2023

By Sarah El-Mahmoud December 21, 2023

Filed under:

Smile aims its gruesome story directly at the most savvy horror fans

And it should put a grin on any genre buff’s face

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Smile aims its gruesome story directly at the most savvy horror fans

Polygon is on the ground at the 2022 Fantastic Fest, reporting on new horror, sci-fi, and action movies making their way to theaters and streaming. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere.

Parker Finn’s debut horror movie Smile is carefully calibrated to do different things to different viewers. To someone who isn’t well versed in horror, it’s an efficient and effective scare-fest, full of big, startling scares and freaky, grinding tension.

But it works entirely differently for a savvy horror crowd who can recognize the ways Finn iterates on other popular horror movies, and predict from the start where the story is bound to go. Smile often winks at the audience, offering up a silent You know what comes next, right? You can see how bad this could get, can’t you? It’s easy to see at any moment what Finn is doing with his characters, and where he’s aiming the story — and that seems to be entirely deliberate. Even so, it’s never easy to shrug off the impact when the promised horrors arrive.

Working from a previous short film, 2020’s Laura Hasn’t Slept , Finn’s script takes almost no time to establish who his protagonist is before her world starts falling apart. Working in a hospital’s emergency psychiatric ward, therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is used to seeing people in crisis, and talking them down. Then she encounters a badly shaken patient who claims she’s haunted by some sort of malevolent entity no one else can see, a creature with a horrifying smile who torments her by appearing in the guise of people she knows.

The story sounds like a paranoid delusion — and when Rose tries to talk to other people about the shape-changing, invisible, malevolent curse-creature, she sounds like she’s having paranoid delusions, too. “I’m not crazy ,” she professes to her blandly kind fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher), her brittle older sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), and her patrician former therapist Madeline (Robin Weigert, in a role that’s light-years away from her turn as Deadwood ’s Calamity Jane). But Rose can’t find a way to sound convincing when she says it, especially to a world that’s cynical and unsympathetic toward the mentally ill.

Smile is often a gimmicky, even corny horror movie, packed with so many jump-scares that the sheer pile-on borders on laughable. Finn uses abrupt, loud sound cues and brutally rapid cuts to get viewers yelping and flinching over things as mundane as Rose biting into a hamburger, or tearing off a hangnail. But no matter how excessively the legitimate scares pile up, they’re startling and convincing. The editing and music are impressively tuned for maximum impact whenever the slow-burning tension resolves with an abrupt, ugly surprise. All of which makes Smile an efficient ride, if an unusually unrelenting one.

But Finn pulls off the equivalent of a magician showing audiences how the trick is done, then doing it so effectively that it still looks like magic anyway. His script patterns Smile after The Ring , with Rose experiencing an inciting incident, discovering she’s on a deadly deadline, drawing in her reluctant but soulful ex to help her, then doing research into the phenomenon, with worrying results. But where other films that followed The Ring ’s beats just felt derivative (including several of its own clumsy sequels), Smile uses the familiarity of the story to set up anticipation. When Rose sees a possible solution to her problem, Smile invites viewers to consider the logical endpoint of her discovery, and wonder whether she’ll make the same selfish choice Naomi Watts’ character made in The Ring — and if so, who will suffer as a result.

Similarly, Smile ’s setup broadly mimics the one in It Follows , with a threat passed virally from person to person, proceeding implacably toward its next victim, while wearing a variety of faces, turning everyone in the protagonist’s life into a potential threat. But again, instead of feeling like a copycat, Smile uses the familiarity to heighten the sense of danger, until viewers can’t trust anyone they see on screen to be human — which puts them neatly inside Rose’s increasingly disintegrating mindset.

The human element in Smile is as carefully calibrated as the jump scares, in ways designed to keep the audience worrying when they aren’t flinching. Finn populates the story with vulnerable potential victims: Longtime horror fans know to be worried when it turns out that Rose has a beloved cat, or that Holly has a sweet 7-year-old boy, or that Rose’s helpful ex Joel (Kyle Gallner) is sensitive, open-hearted, and still in love with her. (Kal Penn also pops up as Rose’s supervisor, in a role that seems particularly designed to provide a target for mayhem.) And the way Rose is repressing a childhood trauma, which she partially shares with Holly and is partially the reason for so much tension between them, sets up some particularly rich emotional ground. Smile is almost painfully efficient in setting up for calamity: It’s bare-bones storytelling, with every new character or element designed to strengthen the sense of dread over who’s likely to die, and how badly.

The movie’s central theme adds to the sense of dread as well. From the moment a policeman dismisses his responsibility to investigate a grotesque death by writing the victim off with a cavalier “She sounds fucking crazy to me!”, it’s evident that at heart, Smile is about the stigma around mental illness, and the urge to dismiss or demonize people navigating it.

Finn finds fertile ground in the vast and possibly unbridgeable gap between sufferers and even well-intentioned onlookers. The audience’s sympathy is likely to be with Rose, who’s living with a terror she doesn’t know how to fight. But it’s also easy to see why other people would find it discomfiting, trying to deal with a woman who’s behaving erratically and even dangerously, while blaming it all on some kind of incomprehensible fear-demon.

A deeper version of this movie might go even further into ambiguity about Rose’s situation, lingering on the question of whether she really is just having a psychotic episode, brought on by stress, overwork, and legitimate trauma. Finn chooses to avoid that path, making it fairly clear throughout that something supernatural is at work. It’s a reasonable choice to make in a movie this devoted to piling up fear atop fear, in getting the audience to anticipate the worst that could happen, while authentically caring about the people who might suffer when it does. Still, it robs Smile of potential subtlety.

But there’s nothing wrong with a horror movie that’s more designed to terrify an audience than to play games with them. As a writer-director, Finn seems to know that people might go to horror movies for different reasons, some more intellectual and some more emotional. Either way, he does an impressive job of making sure they’ll all come away satisfied, and at least a little shaken.

Smile opens in theaters on Sept. 30.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

Now streaming on:

When the horror histories of the 2010s are written, the decade will be associated with trauma metaphors the way the ‘80s are with slasher movies. And although it comes on the cusp of a new decade, the new Paramount wide-release horror movie "Smile" fits right in with its PTSD-induced kin. The difference here is that the monster is barely a metaphor at all: The demon, or evil spirit, or whatever it is—the movie is vague on this point—literally feeds on, and is spread by, trauma.

Specifically, the vague something that dogs Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ) throughout “Smile” likes the taste of people who have witnessed someone else dying by suicide—gruesome, painful, bloody suicide, by garden shears and oncoming trains and the shattered fragments of a ceramic vase in a hospital intake room. That’s where Rose briefly meets Laura ( Caitlin Stasey ), a PhD student who’s brought to the psychiatric emergency ward where Rose works, shaking and terrified that something is out to get her. “It looks like people, but it’s not a person,” Laura explains, saying that this thing has been following her ever since she witnessed one of her professors bludgeoning himself to death with a hammer four days earlier. At the end of the extended dialogue scene that opens the film, Laura turns to Rose with a psychotic grin on her face and proceeds to slit her own throat.

This would unsettle anyone, but it especially bothers Rose given that Rose’s own mother died by suicide many years earlier. That lingering trauma, and the fears and stigma that surround it, form the film’s most intelligent thematic thread: Rose’s fiance Trevor ( Jessie T. Usher ) admits that he’s researched inherited mental illness online, and harsh terms like “nutjobs,” “crazies,” and “head cases” are used to describe mentally ill people throughout the film. The idea that she might not actually be plagued by the same entity that killed Laura, and that her hallucinations, lost time, and emotional volatility might have an internal cause, seems to bother Rose more than the concept of being cursed. The people around Rose, including Trevor, her therapist Dr. Northcott ( Robin Weigert ), her boss Dr. Desai ( Kal Penn ), and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinzer), certainly seem to think the problem is more neurochemical than supernatural—that is, until it’s way too late. 

The only one who believes Rose is her ex, Joel ( Kyle Gallner ), a cop who’s been assigned to Laura’s case. Their tentative reunion opens the door to the film’s mystery element, which makes up much of “Smile’s” long, but not overly long, 115-minute run time. The film’s storyline follows many of your typical beats of a supernatural horror-mystery, escalating from a quick Google (the internet-age equivalent of a good old-fashioned library scene) to an in-person interview with a traumatized, incarcerated survivor of whatever this malevolent entity actually is. Brief reference is made to a cluster of similar events in Brazil, opening up the door to a sequel.

“Smile’s” greatest asset is its relentless, oppressive grimness: This is a film where children and pets are as vulnerable as adults, and the horror elements are bloody and disturbing to match the dark themes. This unsparing sensibility is enhanced by Bacon’s shaky, vulnerable performance as Rose: At one point, she screams at Trevor, “I am not crazy!,” then mumbles an apology and looks down at her shoes in shame. At another, her wan smile at her nephew’s birthday party stands as both a bleak counterpoint to the sick grin the entity’s victims see before they die (thus the film’s title), as well as a relatable moment for viewers who have reluctantly muddled their way through similar gatherings in the midst of a depressive episode. 

Sadly, despite a compelling lead and strong craft behind the camera—the color palette, in shades of lavender, pink, teal, and gray, is capably chosen and very of the moment—“Smile” is diminished by the sheer fact that it’s not as fresh a concept as it might seem. This is director Parker Finn ’s debut feature as a writer and director, based on a short film that won a jury award at SXSW 2020. To spin that into a non-franchise wide-release movie from a major studio like Paramount within two years—in a pandemic, no less!—is an impressive achievement, to be sure. 

But in padding out the concept from an 11-minute short into a nearly two-hour movie, “Smile” leans too heavily not only on formulaic mystery plotting, but also on horror themes and imagery lifted from popular hits like “ The Ring ” and “ It Follows .” David Robert Mitchell ’s 2014 film is an especially prominent, let’s say, influence on “Smile,” which, combined with its placement on the “it’s really about trauma” continuum, make this a less bracing movie experience than it might have been had it broken the mold more aggressively. It does introduce Finn as a capable horror helmer, one with a talent for an elegantly crafted jump scare and a knack for making a viewer feel uneasy and upset as they exit the theater—both advantages for a film like this one. But fans excited to see an “original” horror film hitting theaters should temper those expectations. 

This review was filed from the premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 23rd. It opens on September 30th.

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and critic based in Chicago with a speciality in genre cinema. She worked as the News Editor of  The A.V. Club  from 2014-2019, and as Senior Editor of that site from 2019-2022. She currently writes about film for outlets like  Vulture, Rolling Stone, Indiewire, Polygon , and  RogerEbert.com.

Now playing

Ricky Stanicky

Monica castillo.

Sheila O'Malley

American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders

Brian tallerico.

Film Credits

Smile (2023)

Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language.

115 minutes

Sosie Bacon as Dr. Rose Cotter

Kyle Gallner as Joel

Caitlin Stasey as Laura Weaver

Jessie T. Usher as Trevor

Rob Morgan as Robert Talley

Kal Penn as Dr. Morgan Desai

Robin Weigert as Dr. Madeline Northcott

• Parker Finn

Cinematographer

• Charlie Sarroff
• Elliot Greenberg
• Cristobal Tapia de Veer

Latest blog posts

The People’s Joker and Six Other Films That Were Stuck in Legal Limbo

Metrograph Highlights Remarkable Career of Lee Chang-dong

Female Filmmakers in Focus: Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera

On Luca, Tenet, The Invisible Man and Other Films from the Early Pandemic Era that Deserve More Big-Screen Time

Smile, film review: The most startling horror film of the year

A skin-prickling, unnerving viewing experience, parker finn’s first feature is an astonishing demonstration of film-making restraint.

Tapping into the uncanny discomfort of its central premise, Smile is a striking horror debut that elicits deep-seated feelings of panic.

Combining psychological and supernatural horror elements to make for a skin-prickling, unnerving viewing experience, Parker Finn’s first feature is an astonishing demonstration of film-making restraint, savvy and skill. It never privileges superficial terror over its story’s logic, which also makes it unusually coherent as a horror film with a metaphor at its centre.

Dr Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ) is a psychologist whose job is to calm the minds of the unwell, the psychotic, even the hallucinatory. Then, a disturbing, violent interaction with one of her patients leaves her facing her own fracturing psyche.

It may be PTSD, it may be supernatural, but the fear at the centre of Smile is born from the malignant stain of trauma as a sort of contagion, impossible to shake off once experienced and witnessed. In this case, it is wrapped in the story of a hex, but it doesn’t take much sleuthing to work out the connection.

Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin , is excellent, utterly convincing as a sensible – if stressed – woman whose nerves suddenly begin to betray her.

She is joined in her attempt to figure out the puzzle pieces of this nightmarish scenario by a detective (Kyle Gallner) with whom she shares a surprising history.

Finn has said he wanted Smile to feel like a “sustained panic attack”, and he certainly succeeds on that front: the sound design and soundscape of the film help, with a lurching, creepy score and an all-encompassing sense of itchy paranoia to proceedings.

More on Film Reviews

There is a real intelligence to the film’s use of a basic human gesture: one made grotesquely distinctive by the form of the rictus grin, a sort of involuntary rage hidden by an unconvincing mask.

The terror it induces grasps every element of Rose’s life, from her family relationships to casual social encounters. That gnawing, heightened anxiety is aided by Finn’s lurking, wide-angle cinematography, which rarely has the lead actor out of the frame.

The jump scares are frequent and sometimes shriek-worthy, and combined with mostly practical effects, give the film a more tactile feel than many of its more visual effects-laden contemporaries. While Smile doesn’t always break the mould, it is one of the most effective and startling horror films I’ve seen this year.

Most Read By Subscribers

Accessibility Links

Smile review — you may be cursed and have to grin and bear it

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

★★☆☆☆ There’s a thin, mildly compelling social satire at the heart of this horror about a killer curse contained in a smile. It says that the performative nature of American happiness, as seen in that archetypal “Have a nice day!” grin, is actually a traumatic mask that’s disguising ineffable national trauma.

But subtext can only get you so far. Otherwise this is a lesser remix of The Grudge that follows a harried psychiatrist called Rose (Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin) who witnesses the bizarre suicide of a manically smiling university student. Rose soon discovers that the grisly death is merely one link in a supernatural chain of interconnected suicides that will soon consume her unless she can, within four days, murder someone else in front

Smile (2022) Review

28 Sep 2022

Smile (2022)

There is something fundamentally unsettling about being on the receiving end of an unprovoked happy face; that uncanny creepiness is maximised many times over in Smile , the feature debut of writer-director Parker Finn. An expansion of his 11-minute short film Laura Can’t Sleep , it shares a lot of horror DNA with the likes of It Follows , Hereditary , The Ring , and others. But what it lacks in originality, it makes up for with scares that are effectively calibrated to earn your respect — and cold shivers — almost every step of the way.

In large part, that’s due to star Sosie Bacon. As Rose, she spends much of the movie in hysterics, but it’s believable and gradual, never feeling like she goes from 0-100 in two scenes flat. As she desperately tries to convince her friends, family, and therapist (a game Robin Weigert) that she’s not crazy, while teaming up with her cop ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner) to investigate the origin of her boogeyman, Bacon skilfully modulates her performance to become increasingly unravelled has her life falls apart around. It’s a journey that examines the impact childhood trauma can have on our adult selves — a rich emotional vein mined especially well in Rose’s conversations with her self-absorbed sister, Holly (Gillian Zinser).

There’s less clarity in what Finn is trying to say about mental health and the stigmas attached to it, but Smile ’s primary focus is on terrifying its audience, and it does that well and often. Characters twisting their faces into grotesque smiles before killing themselves in shocking, graphic fashion is not the only striking imagery that Smile manages to conjure up — even pets aren’t spared Finn’s wrath. The jump scares mount quickly but the hit rate is high, and Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s suitably haunting score only adds to the sense of dread. It’s enough to make you want to turn that frown upside down. After you’re done squirming.

Smile Review

A tense and terrifying look at mental health with a supernatural twist..

Smile will hit theaters on Sept. 30, 2022.

“Smile though your heart is aching; smile even though it's breaking.” Those well-meaning words of comfort couldn’t sound more sinister once you’ve seen Smile , a supernatural psychological horror entry that, while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, still manages to stoke tension every time anyone so much as smirks.

This ruthlessly effective, anxiety-inducing nightmare that tells the horrifying story of Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a therapist who finds her whole world turned upside down as she begins to unravel beneath the stigma of mental health.Her newest patient is a young girl who witnessed the suicide of her college professor, and when their first session takes a bizarre, traumatic turn, it looks as though Cotter is now seeing the very hallucinations that her patient reported – a sinister smiling face that appears throughout their daily lives and haunts them with unsettling visions.

If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been done many, many times before. It’s easy to draw comparisons to It Follows , as well as The Ring and The Grudge . But where these movies seem to have inspired Smile, director Parker Finn uses our knowledge of their well-worn tropes to make something a little different.That’s not to say that Smile is a wholly original film – it isn’t. But it does veer off in an interesting new direction.

Finn establishes his creepy, off-kilter view of the world almost instantly with twisting camerawork that sets a disorienting tone. Sure, it’s not the most subtle of metaphors – at times, Cotter’s world is turned literally upside down with almost stomach-churning inverted landscape shots. But this neat trick that’s seemingly borrowed from the likes of Hereditary instantly puts us on edge and makes us much more empathetic to Cotter’s unraveling mental state as a result.

What’s the best modern supernatural horror movie?

Equally, the jump scares start off as a simple means of keeping us on our toes, but slowly build toward something greater. They soon come thick and fast, with plenty of feigns and fake-outs to throw us off. And that’s when you begin to realize that the almost laughable frequency of these moments is doing something else entirely. It’s setting the unnerving stage with a creeping paranoia that keeps us wondering just what’s around every corner.

The scares themselves are quite tame by comparison, but that doesn’t matter.The whole point is to keep us tense throughout the entire film as you second-guess where the next jump scare is coming from… and the really fun part is that you’ll rarely get it right.

These interesting little touches make Smile much more than a cheap scare. Instead, it revels in its ability to make you squirm. The very bloody and visceral nature of the deaths is offset by the weird, ethereal emptiness of its victims’ faces. Finn absolutely nails the creeping dread of a mental health professional who knows she won’t be taken seriously and explores the stigma of depression and anxiety as Cotter fights an uphill battle with those around her.

Sosie Bacon is an absolute thrill to watch as the ever-deteriorating Dr. Cotter, with an incredible performance that gets to the heart of mental health anxiety while grounding the sheer hysterics of being pursued by a supernatural entity. Jessie T. Usher, meanwhile, is all-too-believable as Trevor, Rose’s new boyfriend who thinks she’s going crazy. A brief appearance from Rob Morgan is brilliantly paced as he transforms from rational to utterly terrified in the blink of an eye.

Best Horror Movies So Far In 2022

On the surface, Smile’s premise is a simple one, but there’s a lot more weight to it than initially meets the eye. Sure, it only scratches the surface when it comes to exploring complex issues of mental health stigma. But Bacon wears the weariness of a well-meaning therapist in those early scenes… and as her own sanity begins to unravel, we experience the true horror of a woman who knows what all this means. An unnerving soundtrack from Cristobal Tapia de Veer helps keep us on the edge of our seats with unexpected turns that heighten our anxiety to almost unbearable levels.

Smile may borrow heavily from other horror films, but it certainly brings something unique to the table, and I’m not just talking about that creepy smile. Finn knows the expected horror tropes and uses them against us, building a crippling unease that heightens what would be fairly unambitious jump scares with skin-crawling efficiency. His interesting use of light and sound ratchets up tension throughout, while jump scares combined with smash cuts will leave you wondering what exactly just happened… in a good way. Throw in an impeccable central performance from Bacon and Smile gives us the creepy, horrifying tale of a woman coming undone in the face of supernatural horror.

And remember – Smile. What’s the use of crying?

Smile is a disorienting, anxiety-inducing nightmare that leaves you questioning everything you see. The scares feel over-abundant at first, with feints and fake-outs almost laughably frequent, but they eventually create a creeping paranoia that nothing is quite as it seems. The scares are utterly terrifying at times, and Sosie Bacon plays the troubled Dr. Cotter with a deft hand, exploring difficult subjects of mental health stigma while fighting back the hysterics. Right from the start, Smile gets under your skin. It may borrow from plenty of other horror tales, but director Parker Finn still manages to do a few fresh things with these well-worn tropes.

In This Article

More Reviews by Ryan Leston

Ign recommends.

• Critic Reviews
• User Reviews
• Cast & Crew

• Cast & crew

Plot under wraps. Plot under wraps. Plot under wraps.

• Parker Finn
• Dylan Gelula
• Kyle Gallner

• Quinn Parsons

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Connections Follows Smile (2022)

New and Upcoming Horror

• October 18, 2024 (United States)
• United States
• Untitled Smile Sequel
• Ellenville, New York, USA
• Paramount Pictures
• Paramount Players
• Temple Hill Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

Related news, contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed