Smile (2022)

Smile is a 2022 horror film and director Parker Finn’s feature film debut. The movie follows Dr. Rose Cotter who, after witnessing her mother’s death at a young age, has become a psychiatrist to help people who have also suffered traumatic experiences. One day she meets a new patient with a seemingly treatable condition. The young woman had recently witnessed her college professor commit suicide and had been seeing something that looks like people smiling at her and threatening her. According to her, she is the only one who can see it, and Rose believes she is simply having a manic episode. It’s only when the young woman flies into a panic, claiming to see the thing in the room with them, that Rose calls for help. Rose is too late as the woman is now calm and smiling at Rose. Using a piece of a broken vase, the woman cuts her throat in front of Rose, never breaking her grin.

Unfortunately, everything after the inciting incident, to when the credits roll, is your run-of-the-mill popcorn horror flick. Soon after, Rose begins suffering the same visions as her patient. It’s here the movie begins regurgitating every horror cliche we’ve ever seen. Rose is the “crazy” woman no one believes, the house pet that we already know the fate of, the uncovering of the mystery of the monster via research and evidence files, the interrogation with the only known survivor, and the jump scares (both true and false). Even the rules of the monster feel very familiar.

Because the movie uses all the tired tropes of the genre, we know what’s going to happen three scenes before it happens. We know what’s in the box at her nephew’s party, the monster’s pattern, how to defeat it, and the curse’s loophole. Sometimes figuring out what’s going to happen in a film can be fun, and even rewarding when you guess it right, but here it’s so predictable at every turn that it feels uninspired and boring. While I do like the concept of the monster, I can’t help but notice similarities to a well-known, and much scarier, horror flick titled It Follows. While the rules aren’t quite the same, they’re close enough to where one has to wonder if the 2014 film It Follows had some influence on this monster’s inception.

That’s it. That’s all I really have to say about this one. There isn’t much else to discuss here. It’s a bit disappointing because the advertisement for the film seemed well thought out and effective. Actors were hired by the studio to stand in the background at ball games and talk shows to smile creepily into the cameras. It was such a well-planned promotion that I thought there would be more to this one. In conclusion, while Smile is not a conventionally bad horror movie, it is your everyday, run-of-the-mill horror film, with plot beats and scares that fans of the genre have already seen hundreds of times. Not only has the movie’s theme of overcoming trauma been done many times before, but it’s also been done better. If you chose to skip this one, you wouldn’t be missing much. If you do wish to check it out for yourself, at the time of this review, it is available in theaters and streaming on Paramount +.