the smile horror movie review

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When the horror histories of the 2010s are written, the decade will be associated with trauma metaphors the way the ‘80s are with slasher movies. And although it comes on the cusp of a new decade, the new Paramount wide-release horror movie "Smile" fits right in with its PTSD-induced kin. The difference here is that the monster is barely a metaphor at all: The demon, or evil spirit, or whatever it is—the movie is vague on this point—literally feeds on, and is spread by, trauma.

Specifically, the vague something that dogs Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ) throughout “Smile” likes the taste of people who have witnessed someone else dying by suicide—gruesome, painful, bloody suicide, by garden shears and oncoming trains and the shattered fragments of a ceramic vase in a hospital intake room. That’s where Rose briefly meets Laura ( Caitlin Stasey ), a PhD student who’s brought to the psychiatric emergency ward where Rose works, shaking and terrified that something is out to get her. “It looks like people, but it’s not a person,” Laura explains, saying that this thing has been following her ever since she witnessed one of her professors bludgeoning himself to death with a hammer four days earlier. At the end of the extended dialogue scene that opens the film, Laura turns to Rose with a psychotic grin on her face and proceeds to slit her own throat.

This would unsettle anyone, but it especially bothers Rose given that Rose’s own mother died by suicide many years earlier. That lingering trauma, and the fears and stigma that surround it, form the film’s most intelligent thematic thread: Rose’s fiance Trevor ( Jessie T. Usher ) admits that he’s researched inherited mental illness online, and harsh terms like “nutjobs,” “crazies,” and “head cases” are used to describe mentally ill people throughout the film. The idea that she might not actually be plagued by the same entity that killed Laura, and that her hallucinations, lost time, and emotional volatility might have an internal cause, seems to bother Rose more than the concept of being cursed. The people around Rose, including Trevor, her therapist Dr. Northcott ( Robin Weigert ), her boss Dr. Desai ( Kal Penn ), and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinzer), certainly seem to think the problem is more neurochemical than supernatural—that is, until it’s way too late. 

The only one who believes Rose is her ex, Joel ( Kyle Gallner ), a cop who’s been assigned to Laura’s case. Their tentative reunion opens the door to the film’s mystery element, which makes up much of “Smile’s” long, but not overly long, 115-minute run time. The film’s storyline follows many of your typical beats of a supernatural horror-mystery, escalating from a quick Google (the internet-age equivalent of a good old-fashioned library scene) to an in-person interview with a traumatized, incarcerated survivor of whatever this malevolent entity actually is. Brief reference is made to a cluster of similar events in Brazil, opening up the door to a sequel.

“Smile’s” greatest asset is its relentless, oppressive grimness: This is a film where children and pets are as vulnerable as adults, and the horror elements are bloody and disturbing to match the dark themes. This unsparing sensibility is enhanced by Bacon’s shaky, vulnerable performance as Rose: At one point, she screams at Trevor, “I am not crazy!,” then mumbles an apology and looks down at her shoes in shame. At another, her wan smile at her nephew’s birthday party stands as both a bleak counterpoint to the sick grin the entity’s victims see before they die (thus the film’s title), as well as a relatable moment for viewers who have reluctantly muddled their way through similar gatherings in the midst of a depressive episode. 

Sadly, despite a compelling lead and strong craft behind the camera—the color palette, in shades of lavender, pink, teal, and gray, is capably chosen and very of the moment—“Smile” is diminished by the sheer fact that it’s not as fresh a concept as it might seem. This is director Parker Finn ’s debut feature as a writer and director, based on a short film that won a jury award at SXSW 2020. To spin that into a non-franchise wide-release movie from a major studio like Paramount within two years—in a pandemic, no less!—is an impressive achievement, to be sure. 

But in padding out the concept from an 11-minute short into a nearly two-hour movie, “Smile” leans too heavily not only on formulaic mystery plotting, but also on horror themes and imagery lifted from popular hits like “ The Ring ” and “ It Follows .” David Robert Mitchell ’s 2014 film is an especially prominent, let’s say, influence on “Smile,” which, combined with its placement on the “it’s really about trauma” continuum, make this a less bracing movie experience than it might have been had it broken the mold more aggressively. It does introduce Finn as a capable horror helmer, one with a talent for an elegantly crafted jump scare and a knack for making a viewer feel uneasy and upset as they exit the theater—both advantages for a film like this one. But fans excited to see an “original” horror film hitting theaters should temper those expectations. 

This review was filed from the premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 23rd. It opens on September 30th.

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and critic based in Chicago with a speciality in genre cinema. She worked as the News Editor of  The A.V. Club  from 2014-2019, and as Senior Editor of that site from 2019-2022. She currently writes about film for outlets like  Vulture, Rolling Stone, Indiewire, Polygon , and  RogerEbert.com.

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Film Credits

Smile (2023)

Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language.

115 minutes

Sosie Bacon as Dr. Rose Cotter

Kyle Gallner as Joel

Caitlin Stasey as Laura Weaver

Jessie T. Usher as Trevor

Rob Morgan as Robert Talley

Kal Penn as Dr. Morgan Desai

Robin Weigert as Dr. Madeline Northcott

• Parker Finn

Cinematographer

• Charlie Sarroff
• Elliot Greenberg
• Cristobal Tapia de Veer

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‘Smile’ Review: The Demons Grin Back at You in a Horror Movie With a Highly Effective Creep Factor

A therapist looks like she's losing her mind in a shocker that puts a happy face on trauma.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Smile ” is a horror film that sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits. In an emergency psych ward, Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ), a diligent and devoted therapist, is speaking to a woman who sounds like her soul went to hell and never made it back. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stasey), and she describes, in tones that remain rational despite her tremulous panic, the visions she’s been seeing that no one else can.

Popular on Variety

The smile, as a signifier of maniacal fear, goes back a long way. Just think of Jack-’o-lanterns and the Joker, or the leer that flashed across the mottled face of Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil, or the rictus grins in a movie like “Insidious” or the movie that inspired it, the great 1962 low-budget freak-show classic “Carnival of Souls.” In “Smile,” the first-time writer-director Parker Finn, drawing on films like “Hereditary” and “It Follows” and “The Strangers,” turns the human smile into a spooky vector of the shadow world of evil. The movie has a shivery quality that I, for one, thought “Black Phone” lacked. Yet I wish “Smile” were more willing to be…suggestive.

If you’re haunted by visions of people smiling at you, but no one else sees them, the world is going to think you’re crazy, and much of the drama in “Smile” revolves around Rose looking like a therapist who’s lost her mind. Sosie Bacon, who’s like a taut neurasthenic Geneviève Bujold, creates an impressive spectrum of anxiety, tugging the audience into her nightmare. It makes sense that Rose, teaming up with her police-officer ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), turns herself into an investigator, because that’s what therapists are (at least the good ones). And she’s got a primal trauma of her own: the suicide of her mother, which we glimpse in the film’s opening moments. “Smile” lifts, from “Hereditary,” the idea that the emotional and psychological demons that are passed down through families are our own real-life ghosts. But in this case it’s a megaplex metaphor: literal, free of nuance, illustrated (at the climax) with a demon who sheds her skin, all the better to get inside yours.

There’s a good scene set at Rose’s nephew’s seventh birthday party, where the usual tuneless singing of “Happy Birthday” melts the film into a trance, and the kid unwraps a present that stops the party dead in its tracks. But I would have liked to see three more scenes this dramatic — especially in a movie that lasts 115 minutes. “Smile” will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie. (And why is “Lollipop,” the 1958 hit by the Chordettes, played over the closing credits? It’s one of my favorite songs, but it has zero connection to anything in the movie.) Yet let’s give “Smile” credit for taking a deep dive into the metaphysics of smile horror. The nature of a smile is that it draws you into a connection with the person who’s smiling. That’s why the forces who come after Rose are more than just bogeywomen. That’s why it feels like they’re meant for her.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, Sept. 26, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 115 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release, in association with Paramount Players, of a Temple Hill Entertainment production. Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Robert Salerno. Executive producer: Adam Fishbach.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Parker Finn. Camera: Charlie Sarroff. Editor: Eeliott  Greenberg. Music: Cristobal “Christo” Tapia de Veer.
• With: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robert Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Smile’ Review: Grab and Grin

A young psychiatrist believes she’s being pursued by a malevolent force in this impressive horror feature debut.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

A relentlessly somber, precision-tooled picture whose frights only reinforce the wit of its premise, “Smile” turns our most recognizable sign of pleasure into a terrifying rictus of pain.

And pain is something that Rose (Sosie Bacon), a young clinical psychiatrist, understands, having witnessed her mother’s suicide many years earlier. So when a hysterical patient (Caitlin Stasey) claims that she’s being stalked by a murderous, shape-shifting entity — and that this specter appeared only after she saw an acquaintance brutally kill himself — Rose is immediately empathetic. What happens next is so horrifying it will not only resurrect old terrors but engender new ones, destabilizing Rose and everyone close to her.

Increasingly convinced that she, too, is going to die in some horrible fashion, Rose is plagued by gruesome memories, nightmarish hallucinations and lost stretches of time. Her friends and family — including a distracted sister (Gillian Zinser), distant fiancé (Jessie T. Usher) and concerned supervisor (Kal Penn) — presume psychological damage. Only her ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), a sympathetic police detective, is willing to help her research anyone who might have had a similar experience. And, crucially, survived.

In its thematic use of unprocessed trauma and, especially, its presentation of death as a kind of viral infection passed from one person to another, “Smile” embraces an immediately recognizable horror-movie setup. In the past, this has centered on cursed pieces of technology, like the videotape in “The Ring” (2002 ) and the cellphone in “One Missed Call” (2005) . Here, though, death is dealt simply by witnessing an act, and in that sense the movie’s closest cousin may be David Robert Mitchell’s immensely creepy “It Follows” (2015) . In that film, the malevolent virus was transferred through sex; here, the medium is suicide, and the bloodier the better.

Yet this first feature from the writer and director Parker Finn (expanding his 2020 short film, “Laura Hasn’t Slept”) doesn’t feel like a retread: Even the familiar luckless pet seems included more as a wink-wink to the audience than a lazy crib. The jump scares are shockingly persuasive, gaining considerable oomph from Tom Woodruff Jr.’s imaginative practical effects and Charlie Sarroff’s tipsy camera angles. An unexpected color palette sets a dolorous tone without being suffocatingly gloomy, and Bacon’s performance , both shaky and determined, ensures that the very real agony of mental illness and its stigmatization register as strongly as any supernatural pain. Like the emotional injury they represent, the smiles in “Smile” are — in one case, quite literally — bleeding wounds that can’t be stanched.

Smile Rated R for scary teeth and shocking deaths. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.

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‘Smile’ Is Pure, Uncut Arthouse Horror With a Grin (and a Killer Gimmick)

• By David Fear

You have to admire a commitment to a bit, especially if you’re a film like Smile and in the possession of a simple, genius, creepier-than-thou conceit. Let’s cut to the chase: Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a therapist working in the psychiatric wing of a hospital. A patient comes in and says that, even since she witnessed her college professor take his own life, she’s been seeing…something only she can see. “It’s not a person,” the young woman says, though whatever “it” is, the entity seems to take the appearance of both strangers and loved ones. “It’s like it wears people’s faces like masks.” She hears voices, too — and these voices have been telling her that she’s going to die very soon.

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The one thing that truly is surprising in Parker’s impressive first movie — here’s hoping that there are many more to come — is the studio logo that opens it. He’s made a scary movie that balances psychological shock therapy with old-fashioned fright, shadowy dread with blunt splatterfest FX, an artsy-fartsy sense of stylistics slapped on to a twisty B-movie scenario. It may open with Paramount name slapped on the beginning, but this is textbook A24 horror by any other name. A cynic might think this is another example of a corporate behemoth trying to suck the life blood out of a successful formula concocted in an indie-boutique lab, but we prefer to think of it as spreading the arthouse-spookiness gospel via different avenues. Curses get passed on like viruses. So do blessings.

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Smile Reviews

It's not the most original film of recent years... [but] it uses a familiar box of tricks rather well.

Full Review | Jan 3, 2024

If the sight of a person grinning like an idiot is enough to unnerve you, then you might well be the target audience for Smile -- me, I’ll stick with Jack Nicholson’s Joker for my maniacal grimaces.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 28, 2023

“Smile” works on its own terms immersed with Cotter, wound too tight and with people closest to her turning superficial and nonreciprocating; the care and support she shows them and others is unavailable to her.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

Smile got right under my skin in a way I didn’t expect… anxiety inducing moments, & an a completely unhinged performance from Sosie Bacon! This movie really will make you afraid of smiles

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Smile is nothing revolutionary, but it is creepy, and sometimes that’s enough. It’s more memorable than any recent iteration of Paranormal Activity and will certainly be a hit at sleepovers.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

There were some aspects that were interesting but a lot of moments made me roll my eyes. The last twenty minutes got my attention but it was too little, too late at that point.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 30, 2023

I did not have fun watching this. Relying too much on jump scares and not enough pay-off.

Don’t look away. Just keep smiling through it.

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

Smile shows itself as a strange mixture of goldsmithing and cheap jewelry: the more unconscious it is of its own message and the further it is from giving its monsters a total shape (physical or metaphorical), the closer it is to saying something real.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 25, 2023

... Its formal technique transforms a film full of clichés into an average story that manages to make an impact at the right moments. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 20, 2023

Even with the similarities to other films in mind, Smile proves itself to be its own beast of a horror.

Full Review | Jan 28, 2023

Finn uses the strength of his conceit to turn the screws, raising tension through the Ring-like timeline Rose faces and the sheer relentlessness of her supernatural tormentor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 19, 2022

Building a horror film that feels both familiar and invigorating at the same time, Finn’s Smile delivers enough chills to satisfy.

Full Review | Dec 15, 2022

I watched the entire movie through my fingers. Starring Sosie Bacon her constant panic is operatic. She was terrifying in her out-of-control hysteria.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2022

Smile is an intense horror film dealing with survivor’s guilt that exceeds all expectations. By the film’s end, I found my palms sweating — something I’d never experienced.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 30, 2022

A bone-rattling, brain-flipping chiller sure to be ranked highly by true fans of the genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 30, 2022

We see and hear the stifling moods of fear and frustration Finn can evoke and we wish they weren’t yoked to such a nothing-special story.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Nov 22, 2022

I think I can speak for all of us when I say, no one expected Smile to be quite as good as it turned out to be, but it’s such a joy to watch a truly exciting new horror film on the big screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 19, 2022

Finn is a strong visual director, tilting and pivoting the camera and using shadows, upsetting bits of body horror and distortion effects to generate some potent atmosphere. But he struggles in other ways...

Full Review | Nov 16, 2022

A disturbing and visceral descent into a chilling and tragic nightmare. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Nov 9, 2022

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‘smile’ review: sosie bacon stars in a genuinely frightening horror debut.

The actress leads Parker Finn's film about a woman haunted and hunted by her trauma, co-starring Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert and Kal Penn.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Parker Finn ’s disquieting debut Smile transforms a congenial gesture into a threat. Smiles — warm and inviting by nature — mask deeper, more troubling intentions in this harrowing film about a demonic spirit that latches on to its victims’ traumas. The adage about grinning through hard times here takes on a sinister tone. 

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Rose supplies understanding nods in response to this information, but it’s clear to Laura that the doctor isn’t listening. She’s forming a diagnosis, searching for professional language to rationalize her new patient’s palpable fear. Suddenly, Laura is muted by an unseen entity. The frenzied atmosphere conjured by the young woman’s pleas gives way to a disturbing silence. Laura grabs a shard of a broken ceramic vase and slices her flesh open. The camera (the DP is Charlie Sarroff) doesn’t flinch in the face of this suicide, which is soundtracked by Rose’s blood-curdling screams; it moves in, steadily meditating on the lacerated skin. 

Smile is filled with grim scenes like this one, unnerving sequences that lodge themselves into your psyche as you follow Rose’s panicked, and sometimes labored, adventure. The film, which works in the same supernatural and psychic traditions as The Ring , relishes in fashioning frightening kills and setting a menacing mood. Lester Cohen’s production design, marked by a calculated austerity, builds serene scenes just waiting to be disturbed. Meanwhile, Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score creeps throughout the narrative, adding depth to already ghastly corporeal sounds — teeth gnawing on nails, labored breathing, bones breaking.

Finn and Sarroff portray Rose’s heightened mental state and increasing insecurity with a whimsical visual language. Upside-down shots, quick flashes that translate as tricks of the eye and a predilection for close-ups firmly place us in Rose’s perspective. The film never lets up on the anxiety, using the stomach-churning, heart-racing feeling of an anxious spiral to sustain viewers.

Smile ’s screenplay, which Finn wrote, confidently sketches Rose, but doesn’t demonstrate the same assurance when it comes to other characters like her fiancé, Trevor (Jesse T. Usher). The gallery of supporting figures struggles to shake off its utilitarian impression. Then there’s the reliance on pop psychology — lines that feel culled directly from a social media post diagnosing banal habits as trauma responses — that make the scenes between Rose and her patients or Rose and her own therapist ( Robin Weigert ) feel unbelievable.

Some of these contrivances can be ignored as Rose grows increasingly desperate. Bacon deftly transforms the character before our eyes: The once poised and coolheaded doctor unravels as the gravity of her situation dawns on her. She tries to explain her experience to Trevor and her sister, Holly (Gillian Zinser), and attempts to get a prescription for anxiety medication from her therapist, who feeds her platitudes about the nature of trauma. 

For all its wandering in predictable territory, Smile could easily have been consigned to the mounting pile of contemporary work exploring trauma; clichés about hurt people hurting others and healing one’s inner child do at times claw their way to center stage here. But the movie also teases a far more interesting truth about the lengths people will go to in order to distance themselves from mental disorders or perceived instability.

Rose, just like Laura before her, insists that she isn’t crazy. She rejects the loaded term, which, along with its metonyms, gets thrown around a number of times. But when she tries to confide in her loved ones, they avoid her reality and instead attempt to apply familiar labels to her experience. Her boss ( Kal Penn ) spews pithy statements about mental health and employee happiness, her fiancé harshly wonders what this will mean for his life, and her sister compares Rose to their mother, who also suffered from mental disorders and committed suicide. They stop listening and, therefore, stop seeing Rose — leaving her to face her demons alone. 

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Smile Should Smile More

Smile has such a visually powerful concept that it might take a while before you realize the movie is blowing it. After all, what’s more menacing than someone intently staring at you with a big, toothy, frozen, creepy smile? Parker Finn’s debut horror feature, which he based on his own 2020 short film, Laura Hasn’t Slept , recognizes this basic, uncanny concept. And initially, it delivers: Early on, the film is filled with plastered smiles, and Finn uses the motif in interesting ways. Then the inspiration vanishes and Smile settles into the wan, pro forma genre-flick form it so astutely evaded early on.

The premise is generic horror, but the execution, at first, is anything but. The film follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a young doctor working for an emergency psychiatric unit, who one day meets with a highly agitated patient who has witnessed the grisly suicide of her college professor. The professor, we’re told, had an eerie smile on his face before killing himself. Then, sure enough, the patient suddenly starts to grin creepily before promptly slitting her own throat. Rose is spooked, and it’s not long before she starts seeing terrifying visions of smiles and sinister figures lurking in the dark corners of her house. (There’s some sort of buried trauma in her life involving the death of her mother, so we know that will figure into the proceedings eventually.)

The terrifying smile is, of course, not a new idea for the genre: Paul Leni’s 1928 drama The Man Who Laughs worked the motif so effectively that the film was retroactively classified as horror and wound up influencing any number of proper genre flicks. (It also inspired the Joker.) And although Leni’s picture was based on a Victor Hugo novel, this is an inherently cinematic concept. A film built around smiles — in particular a specific type of smile — has to be able to use the human face well.

Smile , for a while, does exactly that. Bacon stands out in particular. The daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, she’s a terrific actor, but there’s a certain malleability to her visage, which director Finn embraces visually. When she’s at work, made up and put together, Rose seems cool and delicately featured. As the story proceeds, the makeup disappears, furrows appear on her brow and bags under her eyes, and Finn seems to shoot her with wider lenses and harsher light — as if to exaggerate her features. Some sort of increased agitation like this is nothing new in horror, of course, but here, the transformation is so extreme that it captures the imagination. It suggests that Rose becomes a different person when she no longer has to put on the proverbial face.

For a film called Smile , which is all about repressed memories and buried horrors, this is a fascinating stylistic idea. And on the evidence solely of the first half hour or so of this movie, Finn will surely be a director to watch. Direct close-ups, with characters basically looking straight at the camera, both add to the unsettling tone of the picture and focus our attention on the slightest movements of their faces. To put it another way, the film teaches us how to watch it. That’s a nifty accomplishment. If only the film didn’t eventually forget its own lessons.

Even a basic glance at the plot gives you some idea of where it’s all headed, although it takes an agonizingly long time before our heroine realizes that she’s being It Follows -ed by smiles — that this is a chain of viral hauntings with each carrier witnessing one ghastly suicide, then, soon enough, unwittingly committing their own. (This is only a spoiler if you happen to be a character in the movie.) Even more irritating is the fact that nobody around Rose — not the doctors, her ex-boyfriend the cop (Kyle Gallner), her seemingly helpful fiancé (Jessie T. Usher), nor her busybody sister (Gillian Zinser) — seems capable of putting two and two together despite the fact that all these suicides appear to be happening in a fairly small community and are well documented. Everybody is so conveniently lunkheaded. Meanwhile, as Rose gradually loses her grip on reality, the film devolves into a series of dream visions, each of which serves to make what’s happening onscreen less and less interesting. (Every time something suspenseful or scary was interrupted to show Rose waking up in her car or whatever, a little piece of me died.)

These are, perhaps, minor narrative gripes. Horror is the one genre in which the audience is allowed to be one step ahead of the characters and things are allowed to not always make sense. But in Smile , it often feels like we’re one whole act ahead of everybody, and that can lead to tedium. More important, the real disappointment comes in the way that the film discards its visual principles and its most exciting conceit: Smile all but abandons the whole smile thing. That feels downright unforgivable.

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Smile review – grin and bear it in this queasy, nasty horror melodrama

A psychiatrist fleeing her own trauma discovers a grisly, self-replicating chain of destruction

I f you’ve ever had this word addressed to you as an instruction, followed up with “… it may never happen!” you already know how grotesquely unnatural smiling is if you don’t feel like it. It’s much more difficult than pouting when you’re happy, a skull-grimace of misery, betraying the heartbreak within. Incidentally, I lost a bet with myself as to which Nat King Cole song would be ironically played over this film’s closing credits.

Smile is a queasy, nasty horror-melodrama from first time feature director Parker Finn. Like David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows , this takes an indirect inspiration from the MR James short story Casting the Runes , all about an unending DNA-replication of evil. It’s shot in a dull, blank, subdued light into which hallucinations and supernatural incursions can insinuate themselves without warning, together with unsubtly brutal but effective jump scares.

Sosie Bacon (daughter of Kevin) plays Dr Rose Cotter, a consultant psychiatrist who has chosen to work in the most challenging environment possible: a hospital ER in which patients are invariably at their most violent and troubled. This is Rose’s vocation, stemming from a trauma in her own childhood, which she has effectively suppressed with elaborate professional calm. She is now engaged to a handsome young guy called Trevor (Jessie T Usher), having somewhat heartlessly broken off a relationship with Joel (Kyle Gallner), a cop who through a strange quirk of fate is called to attend when Rose faces the most terrifying case of her life. A deeply disturbed young woman is brought in, wretched with fear and lack of sleep, telling Rose about a hideously smiling demon that stalks her, inhabiting the bodies of various people: some are friends, some are random strangers. And then with a grisly self-destructive flourish, the awful smile itself breaks cover, and Rose realises that it is coming to get her too, and she faces a terrible choice if she wants to escape its curse.

Smile is a movie whose influences are certainly detectable: we are, admittedly, close to Scary Movie territory, when we get closeups of the home-security-system keypad on the wall of Rose’s luxurious home, or scenes with her adorable pet, or horrible situations which turn out to be dreams from which the heroine awakens with an explosive gasp. But there is also something arresting about the central, nauseous motif. You see someone taking their own life and are from then on pursued by this grotesque, horrible smile. People who have witnessed something so intimately despairing and horrible have become somehow implicated without their consent in the most violent dysfunction and may indeed spend the rest of their lives toughing it out, smiling through their repressed pain. Yet this buried agony may well manifest itself in carrying on the chain letter of evil: being violent or self-harming with someone else. The movie is a shard of comic and cosmic spite, and the image of the malign smile carries force. Apart from MR James, I found myself thinking of the Kafkaesque short story that Billy Wilder wrote while working as a journalist in Berlin in the 1920s called Wanted: Perfect Optimist , about a man who gets a job in which all he has to do is sit in the office and smile continuously for eight hours a day; it soon becomes an existential ordeal of horror. As for this film, I found myself sheepishly grinning for some time afterwards.

Smile is released on 28 September in the UK, 29 September in Australia and 30 September in the US.

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Smile review: horror film thrills & terrifies, but falters when exploring trauma.

The horror film boasts a strong central performance and the jump-scares and intrigue are haunting enough to keep the story afloat. 

A smile can have many meanings. It could be sardonic, kind, forced, and — in the case of Smile , the horror film written and directed by Parker Finn — downright terrifying. Based on Finn’s 2020 short Laura Hasn’t Slept , in which the protagonist refuses to sleep because of the smiling man she sees in her dreams, Smile takes that concept and expands on it, often to great effect. The horror film boasts a strong central performance and, even while its exploration of trauma and mental illness remain at surface-level, the jump-scares and intrigue are haunting enough to keep the story afloat.

Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a therapist who watches as one of her patients, who claims she’s seeing visions and is being haunted by a smiling entity that wears people’s faces like masks, die by suicide. The patient in question had, just four days prior, witnessed her professor die by suicide as well. After the incident, Rose starts seeing visions herself. Sometimes, the entity appears as people she knows; in other instances, it shows up as complete strangers. Rose’s mental health deteriorates and, though she begins to think she is cursed, no one — not even her friend (Kal Penn), sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher), or therapist (Robin Weigert) — believes her. The more Rose sees the smile, the more she grows desperate, seeking out Joel (Kyle Gallner), her ex and police officer, for help in the hopes that she could find a way to stop the curse before it’s too late.

Related: 10 Best Horror Movies Like Smile

Smile is one of the scariest mainstream horror films in recent memory. It brings audiences into its web of terror, leaving them on edge as they await for the next grisly image or jump-scare. To that end, the film’s jump-scares are magnificently staged, and sometimes unexpected as Finn tricks viewers into thinking things will be as they look. Since the entity haunting Rose can take many forms, these grim moments become more and more unsettling as the story goes on. The film goes for a lot of shots where the camera, focused perhaps on a vast, empty landscape, begins to tilt before fully righting itself in an upside down view. This works to enhance the uneasy, and quite stressful, moments as Rose’s downward spiral escalates. Amplified by the score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer and the eerie cinematography by Charlie Sarroff, the horror aspects masterfully come together.

Where Smile falters is in its examination of mental illness and mental health. Most of the characters, at some point or another, refer to Rose as a “headcase,” and even Rose’s sister and fiancé seem to want to distance themselves from her instead of helping her (or what they perceive as helping her). It siloes Rose, to be sure, which makes her ordeal all the more terrifying as she’s forced to face things alone. However, the film, in its attempts to offer commentary on mental health — and suicide especially, as it affects Rose, whose own mother died by suicide when she was ten — doesn’t have much to say. It offers a surface-level reading of trauma, in that it is a cycle that continues to the point that it takes over Rose’s life, affecting her relationships, work, and mental state. The finale suggests she must face it head-on, but Smile doesn’t delve any further than it has to in its exploration of Rose’s past trauma. By the time Rose realizes she’s never truly been happy, the horror film is reaching its end.

That aside, Sosie Bacon gives a stunning performance as Rose. Bacon’s portrayal is believable, conveying Rose’s internal struggle, as well as her fear and anxiety through haunted looks and emotive eyes. As Rose’s mental health deteriorates, Bacon adjusts her body language to showcase the changes her character goes through — from put-together medical professional to a woman who is being psychologically taunted and retraumatized. Smile is already an overall enjoyable horror on its own, but it’s supremely elevated by Bacon’s performance, and viewers will no doubt find the film to be effective and terrifying.

Next: What To Watch: Horror Movies – Best of 2022, Streaming Guide & New Releases

Smile released in theaters Friday, September 30. The film is 115 minutes long and is rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language.

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Smile director Parker Finn unpacks the movie’s many endings

‘Horror audiences have gotten so savvy, so I tried to put myself in their shoes’

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In some ways, Parker Finn’s feature debut Smile is a standard horror movie, where a central character (hospital therapist Rose, played by Sosie Bacon) falls prey to a supernatural phenomenon and spends most of the movie dealing with the increasingly terrifying battle to understand, resist, and survive what’s happening to her.

But Smile takes an unusual tack at the end, with Finn’s script going in directions designed to shake off horror fans who think they can see the twists coming. After the movie’s world premiere at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, Polygon sat down with Finn and asked him to walk through the movie’s ending: What went into it on a practical level, how to interpret what we see on screen, and why he left out one detail that seems particularly significant.

[ Ed. note: Ending spoilers ahead for Smile .]

How does the movie Smile end?

Rose first learns about the smiling monster that takes over her life when a distraught young woman named Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) is brought to Rose’s hospital in a state of near-hysteria. Laura explains that she’s been seeing an “entity” no one else can see, a creature with a horrible smile that sometimes appears to her in the guise of other people she knows, alive or dead. Then Laura collapses screaming, clearly something over her shoulder that Rose can’t see. As Rose calls for help, Laura stands up calmly smiling, and slits her own throat.

From that moment on, Rose keeps seeing Laura, in public and private, smiling at her. She has visions and nightmares that feature other people she knows, smiling and screaming at her. Rose tells other people about the entity, including her fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), but they believe she’s having delusions brought on by the stress and trauma of Laura’s death. Eventually, Rose and her ex, a policeman named Joel (Kyle Gallner) discover a chain of similarly grotesque suicides stretching back into the past. The pattern suggests that the entity haunts someone until they’re deeply traumatized, then forces them to kill themselves in front of a witness, who is traumatized by the death. Then the entity starts over with its new victim.

Rose and Joel find one person who broke the chain and survived, by grotesquely murdering someone else in front of a witness and passing the entity on to that witness. That sets up a few likely possibilities for the end: Rose can either sacrifice someone else to survive, like Naomi Watts’ character Rachel does with a similar passed-on curse in The Ring ; she can fail to break the curse and the entity can win, meaning Rose dies in front of someone else who takes on the trauma; or she can find another way to confront and fight the creature.

In the end, Smile has all three of those endings. Rose brutally stabs a terrified patient to death at her hospital in front of her screaming boss, Morgan (Kal Penn). But that turns out to be a dream she’s having while passed out in her car in front of the hospital, and she flees the hospital and Morgan in horror.

Then she drives to her abandoned, disintegrating childhood home, where her addict mother died of an overdose — which Rose potentially could have prevented if she’d called an ambulance as her mother begged her to do, instead of fleeing in fear. The original repressed trauma and guilt over her mother’s death is what drew the smiling entity to her in the first place. Rose faces the creature first in the form of her mother, then in the form of a giant, spindly creature. But she forgives herself for failing to help her mother when she was 10 years old, and sets the creature and the house on fire, symbolizing her willingness to finally let go of the past.

But when she returns to Joel to apologize for pushing him away when they were dating, and admit that he scared her because he was getting past her psychological barriers, he reveals himself as the entity again. Rose realizes she’s still at her childhood home, and never actually fought the entity or left — the entire confrontation she experienced was another one of the creature’s hallucinations. Joel arrives, and Rose runs from him, recognizing that the creature means for him to witness her forced suicide and become its next victim.

Inside the house, the tall, spindly creature rips its face off, revealing something raw and glistening with a series of toothy grins all down its face. Then it forces Rose’s mouth open and crawls inside her. When Joel breaks into the house, he just sees Rose, dumping kerosene on herself and turning to smile at him. She sets herself on fire and dies, completing the chain and setting Joel up as the creature’s next prey.

What does the end of Smile mean?

Smile suggests there are many ways of dealing with trauma, by passing it on ( as abuse victims often do by abusing others ), coming to terms with it, or collapsing under its weight. But Finn says the intention with the nested series of fake-out endings was to get ahead of an audience that might have been trying to get ahead of the movie.

“Horror audiences have gotten so savvy, so I tried to put myself in their shoes,” he says. “What would I be expecting? What would I be anticipating? And I tried to subvert that and do something that might catch them off-guard, and kind of flip them on their heads.”

At the same time, the “It was all a dream” ending is a notorious fake-out in movies, so Finn had to make sure he justified that route early on, by making it clear that the creature could provoke elaborate hallucinations in its victims — and that it specifically used those visions to manipulate their behavior and heighten their fear.

“The movie all along teaches you how to watch it, and teaching that you can’t trust Rose’s perception,” Finn says. “It’s in the DNA of the movie to mess with the viewer a little. So I wanted to really pay that off with how the movie ends, how what might feel like an ending might not be an ending. I leaned into that. From early on, I knew I was always interested in following the story to its worst logical conclusion. But I also wanted to have an emotional catharsis. So I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. Hopefully [the ending] delivers on that.”

Finn says he’s looking forward to viewers picking the movie apart, asking questions about what’s real and what isn’t. “But I also really love the idea that if something is happening in your mind, it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not,” he says. “For that person, the experience is real.”

What happened to Rose’s father?

The film’s opening sequence pans across a series of portraits of Rose’s family, with her mother, father, and her sister Holly all happy together. Then Rose’s father disappears from the pictures. It’s unclear whether he died or abandoned the family. Viewers could theorize that whatever happened to him set off Rose’s mother’s decay and led her to spiral into depression and addiction — but it could just as well be possible that he fled because he couldn’t deal with what was happening to her and how her mental health was breaking down. Finn says it was important to him to leave it as an open question.

“I wanted Smile to pretty much be a mother-daughter story. There’s so much in the idea of [Rose’s] isolation, of it being just her and her mom, alone. I like that there’s the tiniest hint that there was a father, clearly, at some point, but it’s deliberately ambiguous.”

Finn says that too much detail about what happened to Rose’s father might have shaped viewers’ expectations or responses in ways that he didn’t want to bring into the story. “I didn’t want it to have undue influence,” he says. “Just the absence, that was the important thing to me — that the absence spoke volumes and really amplified the mother-daughter relationship.”

Connections between Smile and a short that inspired it

Finn previously made a short movie set in the same world, Laura Hasn’t Slept , which was meant to debut at SXSW in 2020. The festival that year was one of the first events to be shut down due to the spread of COVID-19, but Finn was still able to make a deal with Paramount to make Smile based on the strength of that short.

Unlike some short films that evolve into features, Laura Hasn’t Slept doesn’t tell the same story as Smile . “I like to think of them as like spiritual siblings,” Finn says. “Pieces of DNA from the short film are threaded through the feature, and little Easter eggs here and there. And then Caitlin Stasey, who plays Laura Weaver in Smile , is the titular Laura in Laura Hasn’t Slept as well.

“While the two roles, there’s a parallel running through them, they go in quite different directions. So I think it’s very fun. I’d be curious for people who have seen the feature first to go back and watch the short. They might see how the feature could almost be a sequel to the short.”

Audiences currently can’t see Laura Hasn’t Slept — it isn’t available for streaming or purchase at all — but Finn expects that to change soon.

“Paramount’s got it,” he says. “It will be coming back into the world soon. I think they’re gonna try to make sure that it’s out there and accessible in a lot of different ways.”

Will there be a Smile 2?

Finn doesn’t immediately have an idea for a sequel, at least not one he wants to admit to. “I wanted the movie to really exist for its own sake,” he says. “I wanted to tell this character’s story. That was what was really important to me. I think there’s a lot of fun to be had in the world of Smile . But certainly as a filmmaker, I never want to retread anything I’ve already done. So if there was ever to be more of Smile , I’d want to make sure it was something unexpected, and different than what Smile is.”

Instead, he’s currently developing other horror projects. “I’m working on a few different things, but nothing I’m talking about yet,” he says. “But genre and horror is always my first love. And I want to make genre films that are character-driven, that are doing some sort of exploration of the human condition, and the scary things about being a human being. That’s the stuff I really love. And if I can take that and twist it up with some sort of extraordinary genre element, that’s the lane I want to live in.”

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Review: Is horror movie ‘Smile’ so dumb that it’s actually smart? Who knows!

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Writer-director Parker Finn’s feature debut, “Smile,” boasts the thinnest of premises based on a laundry list of horror movie trends and tropes, from the historical to the contemporary. Expanding on his 2020 short film “Laura Hasn’t Slept,” Finn inserts the latest hot topic in horror — trauma — into a story structured around a death curse chain, as seen in films like “The Ring,” “It Follows” and “She Dies Tomorrow.” All that’s needed to pass along the curse is a mere smile, but it’s the kind of chin-lowered, eyes-raised toothy grin that communicates something far more devious than friendly.

That’s pretty much the movie right there, but Finn fleshes it out with some dizzying cinematography by Charlie Sarroff, a creepily effective score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, and a believably twitchy lead performance from Sosie Bacon . Oh, and jump scares, a whole lotta jump scares.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

Back in 1942, horror producer Val Lewton pioneered a technique in the film “Cat People” that’s now referred to as the “Lewton Bus.” If you’ve ever seen a horror movie, you know it: a moment of slowly building tension that culminates in some shrieking noise from a source that is revealed to be harmless but sends the popcorn flying nevertheless — a ringing phone, a home alarm system, the brakes on a bus. It’s a technique that Finn liberally abuses in “Smile,” almost to comedic effect.

In the way that “Smile” takes on trauma as a source of horror so literally, one wonders if Finn is skewering the trend of ascribing all meaning in horror films to “it’s about trauma” (see: every interview original Final Girl Jamie Lee Curtis has given in the past few years about the “Halloween” franchise). The main character in “Smile,” Rose Cotter (Bacon), is a therapist who catches the curse from a young woman (Caitlin Stasey) in the throes of a debilitating mental health crisis after witnessing a suicide. The death curse is like contagious PTSD: Anyone who witnesses the suicide of the person compelled to kill themselves by this “evil spirit” catches the curse and has to pass it on.

Finn continually walks a line in “Smile” making us wonder if the movie is just dumb, or so dumb it’s looped back around to smart again. Finn casts Robin Weigert , the preeminent portrayer of therapists (see: “Big Little Lies”), as Rose’s own therapist, who speaks to her in soothing, infuriating tones that eventually take on a menacing quality. When Finn delves into the childhood trauma that Rose has yet to make peace with, it is visualized and rendered so literally it’s laughable. But is “Smile” smiling with us as we chuckle at the on-the-nose dialogue, imagery and themes? That’s the biggest question in sussing out its quality.

Ultimately, that we never really know the answer to that question, and that the ending settles for a sequel possibility that betrays the film’s own interior logic, indicates that no, “Smile” isn’t entirely in on the joke, or at least willing to show that it is. However, Bacon’s performance as well as Finn’s detailed craft manage to hold tension, and the audience’s attention, for the nearly-two-hour runtime of this horror curio, which is as opaque and somewhat silly as the smiles that drive it.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes Rated: R, for strong violent content and grisly images, and language Playing: In theaters Sept. 30

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Smile – Movie Review (4/5)

Posted by Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard | Sep 29, 2022 | 4 minutes

SMILE is a new horror film that can be seen in theaters. And we are in for a real horror treat with a fantastic sound design and visuals that just work perfectly. Classic horror with a focus on both story and entertainment. Read our Smile movie review here!

SMILE is a new horror movie in which the classic horror smile plays an all-important leading role. This creepy smile has also been used in marketing in the US, where people appear here, there, and everywhere with grim smiles.

While I did not scream while watching the movie, I did jump in my seat several times. Also, I came close to hurting both myself and my Heaven of Horror co-conspirator when one of the first jumpscares hit me hard. I even sat and waited for it, because I knew it was coming, but the timing was just so perfectly cruel.

Kind of like that scene in episode 8 of The Haunting of Hill House where I almost didn’t breathe until a minute later. 

Continue reading our Smile review below. The film is out in US theaters on September 30, 2022.

The Ring meets It Follows with a touch of James Wan

Oh no, now I’m starting again with all the big comparisons, but they’re all quite valid. The plot itself deals with a curse in the style of The Ring . However, the big difference is that only the cursed person can see what is chasing them – just like in It Follows .

The comparison with both movies and plots ends there, but the common denominator is still effective horror.

And then there’s the James Wan touch. I kept thinking of James Wan movies because the framing and shots are used in the most cunning James Wan way. We are dragged around in this world, where the camera moves around and often tilts a little or comes completely upside down.

Personally, I get a bit squeamish about this sort of thing every now and then (a touch of motion sickness, probably), but it works quite effectively in Smile .

That grim sound design. I loved it!

In addition to having the horror smile as an absolute force, Smile wins by having a fantastic sound design. It is so violent that people with slightly frayed horror nerves will probably be in doubt as to whether they should cover their eyes or their ears.

We experienced the same intense audio attack in the Danish horror movie Speak No Evil and also in Thelma . It really is terribly effective!

In fact, we stayed during the end credits only because of the sound that continued until the last second. Just as I was about to leave, new (and rather strange) noises came from the screen [or rather, the surround sound], so most people in the theater stopped in their tracks.

But don’t start thinking that the sound design is the only violent thing. Because there’s a lot of intensity coming from the visuals as well. The last act in particular is a very extreme experience. In a good way. We are talking good old classic cinema horror, where it all spills out of the screen and assaults the audience, who sit quietly pressed back into their seats.

Let’s talk about the cast

The all-important leading role in Smile is played by Sosie Bacon ( Mare of Easttown ) as the psychiatrist Rose Cotter. After a violent experience with a patient, she begins to see many strange things. At first, she thinks it’s “just” post-traumatic stress of some kind. However, she quickly discovers that there is something much bigger (and darker) at play.

In other words, we are indeed dealing with a horror mystery. In the same way as The Ring and It Follows .

As her rather indifferent fiancé, we see Jessie T. Usher (A-Train from The Boys ) and as a helpful cop, we get Kyle Gallner ( Scream ). In addition, there is Kal Penn ( Clarice ) as her concerned and well-meaning boss, and then Robin Weigert ( American Horror Story , Castle Rock season 2) as her therapist.

Let’s just say that there is a lot of terrible childhood trauma in Rose Cotter’s (Sosie Bacon) past. And I’ll leave it at that! The entire cast delivers exactly what they need and in some cases a little more. Jessie T. Usher doesn’t have much to work with, and what he does create isn’t impressive anyway. Unfortunately.

Go watch Smile  in a theater!

Smile is written and directed by Parker Finn, who makes his feature film debut in both areas. And what a wonderful debut to begin one’s career with. I have to be honest and say that I expected a nice 3 star-movie from Smile . In other words, a good horror film with solid entertainment, but not much more really.

However, we are much closer to an effective 3½, and since we don’t give half stars, we round up to a solid 4 to pay tribute to the good theater experience it offers.

I don’t think this is on an Ari Aster or Jordan Peele level, but we’re not that far off either. Not when it comes to the love of, or talent for, telling a horror story in a way that really hits all marks. A bit like we saw in The Black Phone , but I think the running time is better used here. At least I didn’t notice that it lasts just under two hours (1 hour and 55 minutes).

The audio alone is more than reason enough to watch Smile in a movie theater. In addition, there is also something more supernatural towards the end that really does well on the big screen.

Smile  is out in US theaters on September 30, 2022. And around the same time in most other countries.

In Theaters: September 30, 2022 Director: Parker Finn Writer: Parker Finn Cast: Sosie Bacon, Caitlin Stasey, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Rob Morgan, Kal Penn, Judy Reyes

Rose is a psychiatrist plagued by what she believes to be something supernatural. After a bizarre incident with a patient, she begins to experience inexplicable phenomenons that only she can see. Throughout the film, Rose grows more paranoid that what’s pursuing her is something malevolent and, possibly, supernatural.

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About The Author

Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard

I write reviews and recaps on Heaven of Horror. And yes, it does happen that I find myself screaming, when watching a good horror movie. I love psychological horror, survival horror and kick-ass women. Also, I have a huge soft spot for a good horror-comedy. Oh yeah, and I absolutely HATE when animals are harmed in movies, so I will immediately think less of any movie, where animals are harmed for entertainment (even if the animals are just really good actors). Fortunately, horror doesn't use this nearly as much as comedy. And people assume horror lovers are the messed up ones. Go figure!

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‘Smile’ review: This abuse of horror tropes borders on traumatic

Movie review.

Writer/director Parker Finn’s feature debut “Smile” boasts the thinnest of premises based on a laundry list of horror movie trends and tropes, from the historical to the contemporary. Based on his 2020 short film “Laura Hasn’t Slept,” Finn inserts the latest hot topic in horror — trauma — into a story structured around a death curse chain, as seen in films like “The Ring,” “It Follows” and “She Dies Tomorrow.” All that’s needed to pass along the curse is a mere smile, but it’s the kind of chin-lowered, eyes-raised toothy grin that communicates something far more devious than friendly.

That’s pretty much the movie right there, but Finn fleshes it out with some dizzying cinematography by Charlie Sarroff, a creepily effective score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer and a believably twitchy lead performance from Sosie Bacon. Oh, and jump scares. A whole lot of jump scares.

Back in 1942, horror producer Val Lewton pioneered a technique in the film “Cat People” that’s now referred to as the “Lewton Bus.” If you’ve ever seen a horror movie, you know it: a moment of slowly building tension that culminates in some shrieking noise from a source that is revealed to be harmless, but sends the popcorn flying nevertheless: a ringing phone, a home alarm system, the brakes on a bus. It’s a technique that Finn liberally abuses in “Smile,” almost to comedic effect.

One has to wonder if some of the other choices in the film are deployed to comedic effect. In the way that “Smile” takes on trauma as a source of horror so literally, one has to wonder if Finn is in someway skewering the trend of ascribing all meaning in horror films to, “it’s about trauma” (see: every interview original Final Girl Jamie Lee Curtis has given in the past few years about the “Halloween” franchise). The main character in “Smile,” Rose Cotter (Bacon), is a therapist who catches the curse from a young woman in the throes of a debilitating mental health crisis (Caitlin Stasey) after witnessing a suicide. The death curse is like contagious PTSD — anyone who witnesses the suicide of the person who is compelled to kill themselves by this “evil spirit” catches the curse and has to pass it on.

Finn continually walks a line in “Smile” in which one constantly wonders if the movie is just dumb, or so dumb it’s looped back around to smart again. Finn casts Robin Weigert, the preeminent actor of therapists (see: “Big Little Lies”), as Rose’s own therapist, who speaks to her in soothing, infuriating tones that eventually take on a menacing quality. When Finn delves into the childhood trauma that Rose has yet to make peace with, it is visualized and rendered so literally it’s laughable. But is “Smile” smiling with us as we chuckle at the on-the-nose dialogue, imagery and themes? That’s the biggest question in sussing out its quality.

Ultimately, that we never really know the answer to that question, and that the ending settles for a sequel possibility that betrays the film’s own interior logic, indicates that no, “Smile” isn’t entirely in on the joke, or at least willing to show that it is. However, Bacon’s performance as well as Finn’s detailed craft manage to hold tension, and the audience’s attention, for the hour and 55 minute runtime of this horror curio, which is as opaque and somewhat silly as the smiles that drive it.

With Sosie Bacon, Caitlin Stasey, Robin Weigert. Directed by Parker Finn from a screenplay by Finn. 115 minutes. R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language. Opens Sept. 30 at multiple theaters.

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‘Smile’ movie review: this unnerving horror movie is a profound parable for trauma

• September 28, 2022
• ★★★½ , Movie Reviews

A therapist has terrifying visions after witnessing the suicide of one of her patients in Smile , a grim and unrelenting, and unexpectedly profound, debut from writer-director Parker Finn . While the boilerplate narrative follows in the well-worn tracks of The Ring and countless others, this one rises far above the usual mainstream horror fare.

Despite the familiar plot outline, Smile is both a first-rate piece of haunted house filmmaking as well as a deeply allegorical meditation on the effects of trauma: how we absorb and process traumatic events, and subconsciously and unwittingly pass their effects onto others.

Smile stars Sosie Bacon (daughter of Kevin Bacon ) as emergency room psychiatrist Dr. Rose Cotter, tasked with talking down a disturbed patient Laura ( Caitlin Stasey ) in one of the film’s opening scenes. Laura describes being haunted by demonic people sporting unsettling grins that only she can see… before donning a disturbed smile herself and slicing through her neck ear-to-ear in front of Rose.

Afterwards, wouldn’t you know it, Rose starts to see smilin’ demons, too: her family, friends, or random strangers pop out to say “boo!” at the worst possible times. They haunt her when she’s home alone, or when she’s with her emotionally absent fiancé Trevor ( The Boys ’ Jessie T. Usher ), or in one of Smile ’s most bravura scenes of real-world horror, at a children’s birthday party.

Unlike other paranormal horror movies, there’s no question whether the demons are “real” in the sense that they can be witnessed by or have an impact on other characters in the film. But that places Smile in unusual territory: we know that Rose is having a mental breakdown, and as a psychiatrist, so does she. But that doesn’t make the things she sees any less terrifying, for her or us.

Early scenes focus on delivering the terror. Smile ’s sound design deserves special recognition, and director Finn utilizes sequences of dead quiet to unnerving effect before delivering the jump scare that shocks us even though we know it’s coming.

Later scenes start to unravel a plot; with the help of cop Joel ( Scream ’s Kyle Gallner ), an ex from Rose’s past who unexpectedly shows up to investigate Laura’s suicide, we discover that this is some kind of suicide-cycle. Laura had witnessed another suicide before she started seeing things, as had the previous victim, and so on. Rose eventually tracks down one witness who had managed to break the cycle, played by Rob Morgan in a brief cameo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re thinking: Rose has to uncover the true nature of the demon that’s haunting her, solve the mystery, and then vanquish it to break the cycle and save herself. The Ring , It Follows , Truth or Dare and countless other horror films over the past two decades have used the same exact story structure.

But here’s where Smile is different: the “demon” here, in allegorical terms, is a parasite that infects those who witness traumatic events. It haunts them, terrifies them, and eventually takes control of them. And through their unwitting actions, they pass along that trauma to other people so the cycle can continue. The titular “smile” is the false face we present to mask the past trauma that haunts us.

There’s a version of Smile without the grinning demons, the jump scares, or the terrifying monster that shows up at the end, and that grim movie would receive high praise and a limited audience (the excellent arthouse horror film Possum , starring Sean Harris , explores similar themes).

But it’s great to see thematic material like this wrapped up in a deceptively audience-friendly package destined for maximum exposure. Smile delivers the usual scary stuff to those looking for that sort of thing… as well as something much deeper that will haunt you long after the movie is over.

• 2022 , Asia Hernandez , Caitlin Stasey , Dora Kiss , Gillian Zinser , Jack Sochet , Jessie T. Usher , Judy Reyes , Kal Penn , Kevin Keppy , Kyle Gallner , Marti Matulis , Matthew Lamb , Nick Arapoglou , Parker Finn , Rob Morgan , Robin Weigert , Sara Kapner , Shevy Gutierrez , Smile , Sosie Bacon , Ura Yoana Sánchez

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Jason Pirodsky

4 responses.

Such a gripping and thought-provoking review! Smile seems to be an absolute gem, offering a unique and unsettling take on horror while presenting a profound exploration of trauma. I appreciate how the movie delves into the complexities of the human psyche, leaving a lingering impact on the audience. Kudos to the talented team behind this film for creating something truly captivating.

Smile has a surprisingly good message for a horror film. Creepy and thoughtful!

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Terrifying and underrated, but throughout this movie I couldn’t help thinking of Ivanka Trump, she has that same freaky fake smile on her face in almost every photo!

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My Favorite Horror

What is your favorite horror?

Smile (2023) Horror Movie Review

“Smile,” the 2023 horror film directed by Parker Finn , has left an indelible mark on the genre, weaving a tale that is as much about the horrors of the mind as it is about the supernatural. The film follows Dr. Rose Cotter, portrayed with a gripping intensity by Sosie Bacon , as she grapples with the aftermath of a traumatic incident that sets off a series of chilling events, blurring the lines between reality and nightmare.

The narrative thrust of “Smile” is driven by a malevolent entity that preys on individuals who have witnessed traumatic events, particularly suicides. This entity manifests itself in the most disturbing of ways, often leaving its victims with a grotesque grin before their untimely demise. The film’s exploration of trauma, both personal and vicarious, is handled with a deft touch, making it a standout feature that resonates with the audience long after the credits roll.

One of the film’s strengths lies in its relentless atmosphere of dread. It doesn’t shy away from presenting harrowing scenes that are both visually and emotionally jarring. The horror elements are executed with precision, ensuring that they serve the story rather than merely providing shock value. The film’s grim tone is consistent throughout, creating a sense of unease that is hard to shake off.

The performances in “Smile” are commendable, with Bacon leading the charge. Her portrayal of Dr. Cotter is nuanced, capturing the character’s descent into paranoia and fear with authenticity. The supporting cast, including Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert, and Kyle Gallner, provide solid performances that anchor the film’s more fantastical elements in a semblance of reality.

The cinematography and sound design are other aspects where “Smile” excels. The visual language of the film is carefully crafted to enhance the storytelling, using lighting and camera angles to create an atmosphere that is both claustrophobic and expansive when needed. The sound design adds another layer to the film’s effectiveness, with a haunting score that underscores the tension and terror.

While “Smile” does tread familiar ground within the horror genre, it manages to carve out its own identity through its thematic depth and commitment to character development. The film’s pacing is deliberate, allowing the audience to fully immerse themselves in Dr. Cotter’s ordeal and the mystery she unravels.

In the Nutshell

“Smile” is a film that not only delivers on the scares but also offers a poignant commentary on the impact of trauma. It is a well-crafted piece of cinema that will likely be remembered for its ability to disturb and provoke thought in equal measure. For those seeking a horror movie that goes beyond the surface-level frights, “Smile” is a film worth watching. I give 4 out of 5 .

Please help rate this movie: If you already saw this movie, help us rate the movie by click on the Star Rating.

Genre: Supernatural

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Horror sequel Smile 2 trailer has debuted behind closed doors, showcasing its grin-tastic premise with a popstar twist

Get ready to Smile again

It’s time to put on a happy face. The Smile sequel, starring Aladdin’s Naomi Scott, has been given a first look at this year’s CinemaCon. 

Slash Film has the scoop on the footage, which only premiered to those at the event. In it, Scott plays a popstar who is confronted by a sinister man (Lukas Gage) who breaks into her dressing room and – you guessed it – flashes a smile at her.

The pained grins don’t stop, either. A fan with braces also smiles at Scott’s popstar in the Smile sequel, which the outlet describes as looking "flashier" than its predecessor.

Smile horrified audiences with its warped, grin-filled horror back in 2022. The horror movie featured characters terrorized by a smile-spreading demon that caused people to die by suicide. 

The movie ended with Joel, played by Kyle Gallner, having the curse passed on to him by lead Rose (Sosie Bacon). Joel returns for the sequel – meaning this twisted tale of horror tag continues.

Curiously, this isn’t the only gory big release set at a pop concert coming your way. M Night Shyamalan’s new movie Trap sees Josh Hartnett attending a concert with his daughter – only to discover the police are there to track down a serial killer. Plot twist: it’s actually Hartnett’s character, who must seemingly slash his way out of a horror thriller that sounds like Saw meets the Eras Tour. Let’s hope both hit the high notes…

Smile 2, also starring Rosmarie DeWitt, Raúl Castillo, and Dylan Gelula, is set to release on October 18, 2024. For more, check out the upcoming horror movies coming your way, plus the latest from CinemaCon: Deadpool 3 footage , Sonic 3 footage , and Gladiator 2 footage .

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I'm the Senior Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, focusing on news, features, and interviews with some of the biggest names in film and TV. On-site, you'll find me marveling at Marvel and providing analysis and room temperature takes on the newest films, Star Wars and, of course, anime. Outside of GR, I love getting lost in a good 100-hour JRPG, Warzone, and kicking back on the (virtual) field with Football Manager. My work has also been featured in OPM, FourFourTwo, and Game Revolution.

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Plot under wraps. Plot under wraps. Plot under wraps.

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• October 18, 2024 (United States)
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12 New Horror Movies to Keep You Terrified All Year Long in 2024

Posted: April 23, 2024 | Last updated: April 23, 2024

Looking at the slate of upcoming moves for 2024, it's clear that spooky season can last all year if you want it to. New horror movies being released in 2024, include sequels to recent scary hits, prequels and spinoffs for beloved horror classics, and original stories about things like devilish stuffed animals out to ruin lives. (Is Imaginary 's Chauncey the teddy bear the M3gan of 2024? That remains to be seen.)

If you're looking for lighter takes on horror, there's a couple of movies for you. Like, 1988's Beetlejuice is getting a long-awaited sequel with some of the original cast members returning. Also, there's a new take on the Frankenstein story from writer Diablo Cody ( Juno , Jennifer's Body ) about a 1980s teen who reanimates a corpse played by Cole Sprouse.

Looking for something a bit more intense? The first horror release of the year is Night Swim , which is about a haunted pool . There's also the upcoming A Quiet Place prequel about people first finding out that they have to be silent to avoid being attacked by those frightening aliens.

And, if you're looking for all out gore, Smile is getting a sequel, and there's also Terrifier 3 , which is the sequel to a movie that reportedly made some viewers vomit and faint when they watched it. So, basically, after you look at this list of 2024's horror films, make sure that you proceed at your own risk.

1) Night Swim

In theaters January 5

You can kick off your year of horror with Night Swim , which hits theaters January 5. Kerry Condon and Wyatt Russell star as a couple who move into a new house with their two kids. But rather than a haunted house movie, it’s a haunted pool movie. As a hint of what you’ll get, the trailer includes a scary game of Marco Polo.

See the original post on Youtube

2) Lisa Frankenstein

In theaters February 9

The horror-comedy Lisa Frankenstein stars Kathryn Newton as a teenager in the late 1980s who gives a corpse (Cole Sprouse) the Frankenstein's monster treatment and makes him into her boyfriend. Things get more gory from there.

3) Imaginary

In theaters March 8

How about a creepy bear movie? A woman (DeWanda Wise) moves back into her childhood home and finds that her step-daughter Alice (Pyper Braun) bonds with her old teddy bear, Chauncey. The problem is, Chauncey is creepy as hell!!

4) The First Omen

In theaters April 5

Forty-eight years after the release of the classic horror film, The Omen is getting a prequel with The First Omen . Nell Tiger Free stars as a woman who moves to Rome to work for a church and soon learns of a plot to bring forth an Antichrist.

5) A Quiet Place: Day One

In theaters June 28

Unlike the first two movies, A Quiet Place: Day One does not follow the Abbott family (which included characters played by John Krasinksi and Emily Blunt), but is instead a prequel about the time when the murderous sound-hating aliens first arrived on Earth. Lupita Nyong'o stars.

6) Speak No Evil

In theaters August 9

James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis star in Speak No Evil , which is based on a 2022 Danish movie. The film—described as a psychological horror thriller—follows a family who take a countryside vacation but find that their trip turns into a nightmare.

7) Alien: Romulus

In theaters August 16

The ninth movie in the Alien franchise comes out in 2024. Alien: Romulus is a standalone story that is set between the events of the first and second movies from 1979 and 1986. Cailee Spaeny stars, and while not much is known about the plot so far expect terrifying aliens, as usual.

8) Beetlejuice 2

In theaters September 6

Thirty-six years later, Beetlejuice is getting a sequel that features the return of director Tim Burton and cast members Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, and Michael Keaton as the titular home-haunting Beetlejuice. They’ll be joined by new characters played by Jenna Ortega, Monica Bellucci, and Willem Dafoe.

In theaters October 18

Last year's Smile was about a therapist (Sosie Bacon), who becomes part of a curse that involves disturbing images of people smiling very creepily and which is tied to a series of deaths by suicide. The plot of the sequel hasn't yet been revealed, but those haunting smiles will likely still be part of it.

10) Terrifier 3

In theaters October 25

Terrifier 2 made headlines in 2022 for audiences members reportedly vomiting and fainting during showings because of how gory it is. If that doesn't scare you off, a sequel—which again features the terrifying Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton)—will be released in October.

11) Nosferatu

In theaters December 25

Bill Skarsgård is already known for horror thanks to his role as Pennywise in the It movies, and now, he will take on the role of a vampire in the gothic horror movie Nosferatu . Costars include Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

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Abigail Review: Radio Silence’s Bloodsoaked Horror-Comedy Goes For The Throat With A Smile

Another bloody good show from matt bettinelli-olpin and tyler gillett..

While arguably still one of the most dependable film genres, horror seems to be having a moment. Two of the people that are perched at the forefront of that moment are directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. Much like their contemporary and fellow V/H/S colleague Adam Wingard , these enterprising creatives have journeyed from indie horror hits to blockbuster success, with Abigail representing one of their most mainstream efforts yet. 

Release Date: April 19, 2024 Directed By: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett Written By: Stephen Shields and Guy Busick Starring: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Alisha Weir, Kathryn Newton, William Catlett, Kevin Durand, Angus Cloud and Giancarlo Esposito Rating: Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore throughout, pervasive language and brief drug use Runtime: 110 minutes

Much like their latest project’s titular antagonist, there’s much more going on that what you may see on the surface. The basic setup for Abigail is deceptively simple, as our special little ballerina vampire (Alisha Weir) makes life a living hell for a group of criminals who have kidnapped her for a sizable ransom. While playing out that plot, them movie goes beyond what one would expect, delivering some serious surprises.

Writers Stephen Shields and Guy Busick not only show off their knowledge of vampire lore but also audience expectations – adding a series of story turns that gradually change the game. All the while, movie-goers are invited to enjoy a good old fashioned horror-comedy that knows when to make you laugh, when to make you scream scream, and when to just let you breathe.

Abigail is a horror-comedy thrill ride that provides more delight than advertised.

Abigail thrives on its surprises for anyone curious to experience its charms. The trailers promise a horror comedy, but you’re also getting a mystery thriller and a family drama mixed in as well.

All of those angles are reflected in the cast of characters we’re invited to follow throughout the bloodbath. These complete strangers – played by Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens , Alisha Weir, Kathryn Newton, William Catlett, Kevin Durand, and Angus Cloud – are trying to figure each other out while also attempting to outsmart Abigail, and both contribute greatly to the entertainment. 

Vampire fans should be ready to see some of their favorite movies reflected in Abigail , as there are some sly references and tip of the fangs to the classics. It never gets tired or cliched – hitting a high when the characters find themselves engaging in the expected round of parsing out vampire lore to see what works and what doesn’t in fighting the bloodsucking undead. Nods to True Blood , Twilight , and Anne Rice are thrown in, and the name checks demonstrate wonderful knowledge of the monster's cinematic legacy.

Great credit goes to Director of Photography Aaron Morton and Production Designer Susie Cullen, two of the key filmmakers whose work ratchets up the tension in Abigail . Between Cullen’s designs in the spooky house where the characters are trapped and Morton’s cinematography, the movie maximizes the fun and scares that almost entirely unfold in a single location. 

With the picture really playing into the feel of a living breathing board game, the small ensemble cast present is given ample opportunity to shine – even when they are absolutely drenched in gallons of blood and gore.

Alisha Weir more than holds her own amidst a cast of genre acting ringers.

Walking out of Abigail , I couldn’t stop praising the centerpiece performance of young actor Alisha Weir. As written, the titular vampire is delightfully memorable modern horror antagonist. Playing a master manipulator, a sass factory, and a physically imposing opponent all in one, Weir doesn’t miss a step when shifting between the multitudes of this fanged feature player. 

Weir is certainly no stranger to praise, as she previously played the acclaimed lead in Netflix’s Matilda The Musical adaptation. Abigail is another strong addition to her resume, as she isn’t simply a precocious menace that rides the coattails of “creepy children” tropes that we've seen too many times before. She’s actually believable as a menacing presence going toe-to-toe with her adult co-stars. This is definitely saying something given that the grown-up cast of this fright night more than holds up their end of the bargain. 

Since Abigail focuses on a relatively small cast, any potential weaknesses in the line-up would be easy to spot. Everyone’s in top form though, with Barrera acting as the most humane member of this group of strangers who are given Reservoir Dogs -style code names straight from the Rat Pack. (Stephen Shields and Guy Busick have to get a bit creative when it comes to naming a six person team after a legendary group that has only five members, but the movie makes it work.)

Abigail is notably the second film this year that’s continued the trend of filmmakers with an indie pedigree getting weird with Dan Stevens – the previous title being Adam Wingard's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire . Even if Abigail wasn’t as fun as it ultimately turns out to be, I would support the continuation of that effort with all of my being – but after seeing yet another match made in heaven between Stevens and directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, my expectations and hopes for the actor's future are exceptionally high.

You don’t need to be a horror fan to dig into Abigail, but you’ll be so much more entertained if you are.

There is so much to like about Abigail , it’s almost scary. Following Ready Or Not , Scream and Scream V , Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett continue to develop winning concepts, and execute clever casting and slick directorial chops – adding another victory on their resume. With several different genres and tones successfully at work, Abigail is a title that could appeal to fans of pretty much any type of movie, as there’s something for everyone in this expertly planned maze. 

Of course, horror is the home in which this picture’s heart truly dwells – in case the excessive amounts of blood in the trailers didn’t already give that away. Rather than just provide a crowd pleaser that’s horror adjacent, Bettinelli-Olpin and GIllett double down on the gore and give genre-lovers what they're looking for. Full of hidden delights, and a cheekiness that matches its mean streak, Abigail should surprise even the most hardcore movie-goers who think they know what to expect.  

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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