There is something haunting and evil about Sosie Bacon’s performance as a woman who is possessed by an evil entity. Smile has legitimate scares that pack a punch. If only the film was not too damn long. The terror washes back and forth like waves due to the slow pacing of it all. A long second act has lulls in it that tried my patience. Instead of two hours, ninety minutes would have been better for the movie impact-wise. Bacon’s mental and physical spiral holds the narrative together. Everyone thinks she’s having a psychotic breakdown or losing her mind, whatever.
Dr Rose Cotter (Bacon) works in a psychiatric unit of a hospital. She is a therapist for people with mental problems. Rose suffers from persisting post traumatic stress disorder due to witnessing her mother’s suicide as a young girl; this has made her overly sympathetic to others’ pain and suffering. Rose’s world collapses upon meeting Laura (Caitlin Stasey), being admitted in hospital days following watching her teacher kill herself, franticly telling Rose that an invisible ghost chases her day and night since she was born; it can look like anyone from the present or past times among them being crazy looking men with terrifying grins on their face doing horrible things.
Slightly traumatized by Laura’s death, she begins to see smiling visions too over time, while also haunted by the manner of her mother’s death which involved bloodshed and violence.Rose at her nephew’s birthday party does some shocking acts that leave many people concerned about her.She needs intervention from Jessie T Usher playing his boyfriend provide him with therapy.They recommend that she takes some time off work.Rose goes through an agonizing experience which makes her more unstable after every awful accident.Bacons faces stays locked to the camera showing how far down she is going psychologically.Bacon emotes fear extremely well throughout this movie.She loses everything when The same gangsters say she is crazy and seeing things like them.Rose has no one when she really needs assistance.
Writer/Director Parker Finn (Laura Hasn’t Slept, The Hidebehind) has a hit and miss approach. He uses Bacon to build up palpable tension. I feel how scared she is in solitary places. When it comes to the dark rooms and spooky noises, there are great scares in this film. This changes when Finn goes full blown horror with a climactic onslaught of macabre creature effects. Perhaps this payoff works for others, but I found it to be more of a genre standard than something particularly interesting.
Smile attains the most important objective of any horror movie worth its salt: scaring people and keeping them involved at least during the best scenes. If he had cut down on some trivial details, Smile would have been fine with ignorable excesses here and there that do little but bore the audience.It’s lucky that Bacon manages to keep Rose alive within you.She bursts on screen.She dresses up the dance.Smile could have trimmed up all that extra stuff that nobody watches.
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