Smile

Smile starts with a creepy premise, and for the first half or so of its eventually interminable nearly two-hour run time, it keeps matters reasonably creepy.  But what director/screenwriter Parker Finn ultimately delivers is a bloated, cliché-riddled retread of tired horror tropes and a monster visually defined by the ultimate horror: a failure to smize.

It begins with promise; at the beginning, Smile seems like it’s going to use the genre to explore generational trauma and the terrifying way that something completely out of your control—your genetics—can define your life in a way that can seem almost fated.

Our hero is Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a therapist who learned firsthand as a child the lethal toll mental illness—in this case depression and addiction—can take on a person’s life.

But after broaching these ideas, Smile takes them nowhere but exploitation land. The repetitive images of Rose’s graphic family trauma writ large on the screen start to feel manipulative, particularly with a third-act plot “twist” that sets the narrative spiraling into ever crueler and nonsensical plot machinations. There’s eventually a Big Monster Reveal scene when we see the actual malevolent force behind the rictus-grins that have been tormenting Rose. It is at once a manifestation of Freud’s worst misogynistic nightmare and deeply underwhelming.

We meet Rose as she sees her in-hospital patients, working in a meticulous Olaplex bun with people in various stages of dysfunction. Smile begins its descent after a patient dies by suicide during a session with Rose. Glaring reality check aside (This is a locked facility. Nobody thought to check this suicidal patient’s pockets for a sharps before they left her alone in a room with a doctor who hadn’t seen her before?), the incident deeply unsettles Rose, not the least because the patient was grinning while she opened up her aorta.

The incident is the latest in a string of similarly lurid deaths, and Rose’s challenge is to avoid being the next. Alas, Smile starts to feel as if it were written by an inept committee. Any thoughtful or true exploration of mental illness and how it manifests is cast aside in favor of the increasingly gory encounters that torment Rose. In the end, it’s a lot of trauma and not much point. R, 115 min.

Wide release in theaters

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