In the wake of a, frankly, disappointing summer movie season, we arrive at fall and with the start of October, so arrive the plethora of Halloween scary movies to theaters everywhere. While the front runner of the pack, box office wise, is clearly Halloween Ends, there are a few others hoping to reap the bread crumbs of the month, which isn’t hard given that Horror is one of the most profitable genres of the industry due to its very low standard budgets.
One such production is Smile, directed by XXXX and starring YYYY. The film was heavily advertised during the month of September and since its release has enjoyed a fairly successful box office run. I had the occasion of watching it a few days ago and here are my brief thoughts on the movie.
On the surface, it’s a pretty entertaining evil spirit story with a creepy and interesting premise. As an idea, it rises above your basic demonic entities that just slam doors and move sheets, and it lends itself to a constant method of scaring the viewer through sudden and unexpected appearances, in other words, consistent jump scares (the movie doesn’t really go beyond the jump scares much but I’ll get to it later).
The plot revolves around Rose, a psychologist in a public hospital who on a certain day interviews a patient who claims to be routinely seeing a creepy entity that is following her around smiling at her in a horrific way and wearing different faces, and that this entity will kill her that very day. Very quickly, the patient freaks out, saying to Rose that the entity is in the room. Eventually, the patient seems to become possessed and does that very same horrible smile to Rose, before killing herself in front of her.
As you can probably guess, the curse now passes to Rose, who starts to see people smiling at her creepily around, smiles that only she can see, sometimes it’s people she knows, sometimes strangers. Not only that, other scary things start to happen around her, causing her relationships to take a nosedive because of this, and of course, no one believes her and think that she is insane, you know, standard horror movie stuff. Rose knows that eventually this curse will lead to her own death and so she is desperate to find a way out of it.
I won’t dabble much on the presentation. It’s standard horror movie cinematography, standard sub-par special effects, unsettling music which kicks off suddenly when the jump scares hit, and the acting is serviceable enough. I actually think the character of Rose is pretty well portrayed, she definitely seems super desperate and I totally buy it. The actors who have to do the creepy smiles also do them pretty well, they are super scary, I imagine they’re probably enhanced with some special effects to make the angles of the lips and eyes more disturbing, but the person underneath is really giving it their all.
But the key to this genre is always, the quality of the scares, the creation of a creepy atmosphere, the richness of the story, and its pacing. On that aspect, Smile is competent enough to hold my attention throughout, but it does falter here and there. We already mentioned the originality of the concept. True, this type of travelling curse is definitely not unheard of, it’s almost identical to It Follows (2014), for example, but with smiles and suicides instead of sex. That said, it is well thought out, and the smiles make it so creepy that it actually enhances the atmosphere greatly, so definite points there.
It’s in the story itself and its structure that I find somethings to complain about. The problems start at the beginning of the second act, during what I like to call the “Supernatural Investigation” phase. Much like episodes of Supernatural, a lot of horror movies have the characters look into the origin, the method, or the patterns of the demonic entity in question in order to find a way to kill it or stop it, and Smile is no exception. I actually like this trope a lot, it’s certainly better than not having our characters react in any proactive way and just endure being tormented until the climax.
However, Smile makes the mistake, at least for me, of not structuring this part of the story in a way that gives the characters something to work with towards the climax. By that I mean, investigating things in this movie only serves to paint a clear picture to Rose and to the audience of how hopeless her situation is, and I don’t find it particularly compelling.
Obviously in a horror movie the threatening force should always have the upper hand, otherwise it’s not threatening or scary, but if the monster just gets scarier, and Rose stays pretty much where she is, then I question the point of telling her story specifically, as opposed to the beast’s other victims. Without spoiling too much, she goes into the climax pretty much planless, assuming essentially a passive role, and eventually attempts a strategy to break the curse that was never set up and that the audience has no reason to believe will work.
This problem leaks into the impact of the film’s ultimate conclusion, which, without spoiling, is kind of predictable, and not that fulfilling. In essence, this movie does a great job setting the stage, but the great spectacle where things actually move forwards in the story of this curse is left for potential future installments, if we ever get them.
There are other things I could complain about, characters are slow to grasp key plot elements that would make their lives easier, they don’t communicate properly leading to misunderstandings and avoidable conflicts, but these are more standard horror movie tropes that I’ve sort of come to accept. Despite that, I would like to see more movies where everyone acts with greater openness and capacity to explain themselves, while still retaining the scary components (I think the Conjuring movies are great examples of movies that pull this off).
I also think the movie relies a bit too much on jump scares. They benefit from the added kick of the smiles, making them more than those jump scares where something random appearing on screen with a sudden sound spike and a quick camera movement, even if it’s nothing scary at all. In Smile, it is sudden, it is quick, and it is always scary, which is good, but the few moments where it is slower, and scary in a subtler way are few and far between, and that’s unfortunate because they are among the best scares in the movie.
Whenever Rose realizes that the person she’s talking to is actually the spirit in disguise there is a fantastic slow transition to that horrible smile that is just fantastically horrifying and plunges the moment into the deepest dread and despair. That is what the movie should have had more of.
Would I recommend Smile to you? Actually, yes. If you’re a horror movie fan, you’ll appreciate the fact that while Smile sticks to most of the genre’s tropes, it embellishes them to craft a solid experience of unsettling tension and building despair. It does become genuinely scary a handful of times throughout the runtime, and is consistently creepy, that’s something a lot of scary movies these days don’t accomplish at all from start to finish. As a final note, if you can, see this one with friends. Whenever the characters act stupid or slow you’ll get a few solid laughs that will relieve the tension nicely.
Do you plan on seeing Smile? If you’ve seen it, what did you think of it? Leave your thoughts down below in the comments and as always, thank you for reading.