Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Smile

Why run a horror movie review almost a week after Halloween? First off, fuck you. Second off, if it's good enough for The Simpsons, who've been airing their annual Halloween episode, "Treehouse of Horrors," well after Halloween for the past decade or so - except for this year, I know! - then it's good enough for ol' Cinemavenger.

Taking a totally not scary, reasonably harmless, run of the mill thing and making it creepy is a tried and true tactic for horror movies. You really just have to add "killer" in front of it. A killer car, a killer dog, and a killer video tape leap to mind from the popular flicks Christine, Cujo, and The Ring, respectively. Having a killer smile is usually considered a good thing, but Smile tries to turn that upside down frown into the stuff of nightmares.

It doesn't fail miserably, but it does fail almost completely. Why? A little thing called motivation. After Doctor Rose Cotter (Sosie "Daughter of Kevin" Bacon) watches a young woman kill herself mid-diagnosis while smiling like a literal crazy person, she gets welcomed back (get it?!) into her own lingering trauma from finding her mother's dead-by-suicide body.

​Cotter starts seeing things, usually someone smiling at her scarily, so she starts to investigate her dead patient and discovers that some sort of evil entity has been forcing people to kill themselves and then jumping to whoever witnesses the suicide before forcing that person to kill himself or herself. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Naturally, her fiance, and pretty much everyone else she tells, thinks she's crazy, and that's where Smile misses the chance to become epic by playing with the very real, very sad reality that once someone thinks you're insane you're nutjob guilty until proven innocent. That would've been some seriously scary shit, the kind that worms its way into your brain and refuses to leave. Instead, the only chills this forgettable flick has to offer are jump scares. 

As bad a missed opportunity as that is, what really slays Smile is that it never tells us why the evil entity is going to the trouble of forcing all these people to commit suicide. Cotter's backstory sets up what could have been an awesome explanation/motivation, but the writer and director were obviously too fucking stupid to realize it.

The whole world will definitely not be smiling with Smile.

November 4, 2022