The concept of a curse has given rise to some of the most nerve-rattling horror cinema of the last decade. Using this conceit, Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Natalie Erika James's Relic both took the idea of inheritance to places horrifying yet humane. Skipping in their footsteps comes Smile, which sheds their grungy indie veneer for a slick spin on the trope. But can it satisfy on the scares promised with a beaming ad campaign?
On its face, Smile has a terrific setup: A witness to heinous violence is stalked by a corporeal curse that brings on trauma, terror, derision, and ultimately death. It’s like The Ring, but instead of creepy kids, there’s a wretched grin that follows and dooms you. Sadly, this cool concept crumbles under the weight of a major screenwriting problem — our hero is the movie's least interesting character.
Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is plagued by a mysterious curse that stalks her with sinister smiles, but she’s far from thrilling. In the vein of folk horror, she’s the rational metropolitan figure in her role as a well-respected therapist. And she's a noble one at that, working at a struggling hospital and caring for patients even if they can't pay her a fat hourly fee. But Rose's goodness doesn't make her as instantly compelling as writer/director Parker Finn might hope.
Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the characters around Rose get to have, well, character. Her sister Holly (a cuttingly funny Gillian Zinser) is a nightmare of a suburban housewife, the wine-swigging cliche who complains about parenting in between backhanded compliments. Holly’s husband (Nick Arapoglou) matches her energy as a succinctly snobby doofus whose crass commentary and easy greediness make for grim but solid punchlines. At the hospital, Kal Penn brings flushed concern as Rose's colleague, while Kyle Gallner plays a sensitive, slightly broody cop. Judy Reyes from Scrubs even pops up for an emotional sequence riddled with anger and grief. They all bring color, while Rose is devotedly beige, even as Bacon hurls herself into the frenzied physicality of fear and slippery shrieks of terror.
It's not that being a nice good person is inherently boring. Final Girls like Halloween's Laurie Strode and Scream's Sidney Prescott are also good girls, but each has a bit of attitude that signals she can stand up for herself when push comes to stab. Smile dips into the slasher subgenre with its gesture at this Final Girl trope, yet Finn never gives Rose the essential verve she needs to make us believe she has some fight in her. Without this salty contrast, Rose feels too vague and unreal, lacking the human complexity that makes for a compelling horror heroine. This distance means that as her smiling slasher closes in, her battle for survival earned laughter from the audience, not screams.
The bigger problem for Smile might be that Bacon is outshined in the inciting incident. That unnerving smile you've seen plastered across promo posters (and in the image above) belongs to Caitlin Stasey, who delivers a frightening and full arc in one all-too-brief sequence.
College student Laura Weaver (Stasey) comes to Rose with a story too wild to be believed. The battered girl moves with heavy fatigue yet is electrifyingly on edge, hinting at an offscreen battle that has robbed her of sleep and peace. Desperation radiates from her dark eyes as she spills nonsensical claims about an entity that "looks like people" and wears their skin "like a mask." Stasey is riveting in her weariness and bewilderment, and nerve-rattling as she leaps into wails of terror over something no one else can see. Few screams in a horror movie have given me chills, but Stasey's had me goose-pimpled and trembling. Then, just like that, the smile slides across her face, too broad, perfectly jarring.
In a few short minutes, Stasey has made herself an iconic horror figure. Regrettably, nothing in Smile is as sensationally scary as this early sequence.
Maybe you're not watching horror in search of someone to root for. Perhaps you just want some mindless fun and frights. Well, if that's the case, you're in luck; Smile is braced with impressively gory sequences of inventive mutilations and gruesome deaths. The central smile gag works to varying degrees depending on the actor putting it on, but is surprisingly — and disappointingly — sparing in its use. Still, these freaky facial distortions build to a climax that reveals a nightmarish creature that's not exactly unique but is nonetheless terrifically scary to behold.
However, too many of the attempted thrills in the movie are just jump scares: a sinister figure revealed in a dark corner, a loud sound inciting panic at a mundane occurrence, like cracking open a can of cat food. Finn does a fine job of setting up these small shocks, so that even if you anticipate them, the payoff will make you jump. And while this can be fun, his heavy dependency on these frightening flourishes feel cheap and flimsy without a roiling boil of tension to keep the momentum going.
This is the great tragedy of Smile. It's not the grisly tale of a therapist who followed her patient down a dark path, but of a concept wasted on jump scares and a boring protagonist. There are moments of promise, like a recurring motif about ringing telephones and what they ultimately mean to Rose. Plus, Finn ambitiously dabbles in different horror tropes with his folk-horror culture clash, his slasher Final Girl, and a clever curse that transforms every building into a haunted house. But he fails to create a heroine we frightfully feel bound to, which leaves Smile little more than a creepy watch. It could have been the kind of sinister flick that follows you home, slipping through the door, up the stairs, and curling up deep inside your head, daring you to sleep. Instead, Smile feels as disposable as a candy wrapper.
Smile opens in theaters Sept. 30.