Smile

 

Smile

Starring Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Kal Penn
Directed by Parker Finn

Welcome to "Cooking a Generic Horror Film Disguised as a Unique Idea." To make the deliciously hollow "Smile" film, here are the ingredients and what to do:
Take roughly 90 minutes of "The Ring"
Sprinkle in moments from "The Grudge"
Insert a smidgen of "The Babadook"
Add a few pinches of "It Follows"
Then dump them all into a pot and stir furiously with frequent jump scares and you've got "Smile," an "original" horror idea that worked well as a short film, but when you elongate it into a nearly two-hour snoozefest, you realize you might've overcooked it.

Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) works at a mental health facility when a young patient named Laura (Caitlin Stasey) arrives, worried that something is out to kill her after she witnesses her professor's suicide. During their talk Laura freaks out and after Rose calls for help, notices Laura is now calm and smiling - and then she slits her throat. Shocked, Rose tries to comprehend what just happened, and in doing so also dealing with her mother's suicide that she discovered when she was younger, but there's something else out there. A demon has been passed from Laura to Rose, and now Rose has a certain amount of time to find out how to stop it before it possesses and kills her, making it look like a suicide in front of someone else, thus continuing the curse.

For some reason, people tend to love "Smile," and I cannot fathom it. So far it's garnered a 77% critic and 80% audience approval rating, and to me it felt like cheap knock-offs of better horror films. Essentially the entire plot of the film is similar to "The Ring:"
-a young woman witnesses something that threatens to kill her in a pre-determined amount of time ("The Ring" is seven days, "Smile" varies from four to seven)
-said young woman has a significant other/former significant other who's keenly adapt to helping her solve the mystery
-the movie spins its wheels as she slowly investigates the mystery, stopping every now and then to include a cheap jump scare (although "The Ring" was much more effective with them)
I could go on but that'd go into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say "Smile" is pretty much "The Ring" with a new set of clothing.

Not only that, but "Smile" also takes from "The Grudge" in that both involve a vengeful spirit, "It Follows" because the demon can take on the form of anyone the person knows, or even a total stranger, "The Babadook" in that it deals with mental disease, and a little bit of "The Happening" when we see through CCTV footage of someone killing themselves in front of someone else. They even took from the genius marketing campaign of "The Blair Witch Project" by inserting actors in major events (like baseball games and "Good Morning America") to stand and stare with an unwavering smile. There's even generic horror tropes in that the main character has exhibited mental illness before after the suicide of her mother, so no one believes her when she tells them what's happening, except for the former aforementioned ex-boyfriend (who just so happens to be a cop who lets her in on sensitive police investigation information). To say this is "original" is a deep misnomer, as the only "original" thing is the fact that the person smiles before they die. 

As the mystery continues, the film tries to wake up the audience with intense auditory cues and jump scares, and it's the sound effects and music that's the most effective, but not by much. You can see the scares coming as one moment she's standing alone in a darkened kitchen and all sound goes silent before the big crescendo, or the most unintentionally hilarious moment of when she's interviewing the widow of a man who killed himself and who talked about having to identify his body, where I was thinking, "and this was the part in "The Ring" where we get a quick flash of OH there's that moment here when we see a flash of the dead guy's mangled body! Right on cue!").

Sosie Bacon is Hollywood royalty, as she's the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick (although she looks more the spitting image of her mother), but not even she could save this by-the-books film from jumping off the rails. She hits all the beats of the typical heroine looking for a solution, including interviewing the lone survivor of the events, filing through Internet searches and audio recordings, and enlisting the help of her ex-cop-boyfriend in the investigation. All the while she screams in her car (like, a lot), endures the not-so-subtle taunts by her new fiance (Jesse T. Usher, doing his best with the thinly-written character he's given), and deals with her older sister who doesn't want anything to do with her after a very traumatizing party for her child. What's worse is that Bacon is, by definition, a Scream Queen since she's starring in a horror movie, but her scream is laughably bad - it's like a child throwing a temper tantrum rather than a woman screaming from her innermost bowels.

While horror in the 80s will be remembered as the slasher decade, the 2010s and 2020s will be remembered as the mental illness decades with films like "Hereditary," "Midsommar," and "The Babadook" shedding light on mental illness and how it affects the worldview in the eyes of the horror cinema.  "Smile" will be included on that list - but way low on that scale. This is the cinematic version of "can I copy your homework?" it asks "The Ring," and it replies, "yeah but make it a little different." In that respect, "Smile" achieved its goals - but on the grand scale of horror, it fails miserably to incite anything more than a soft groan, and nothing to smile about.

The Score: C