Smile

 1.5/4

Starring: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn

Rated R for Strong Violent Content and Grisly Images, and Language

"Smile" has four great scenes and a whole lot of crappy ones.  On a technical level, writer/director Parker Finn knows what he is doing.  He can build a sense of dread and terror almost out of thin air.  Which he has to do because the majority of his film sucks.

Rose Cotter (Bacon) is an overworked doctor at an emergency psychiatric facility.  One day, a traumatized young woman enters her hospital and is put under the good doctor's care.  Her name is Laura Weaver (Stasey), and she is in hysterics.  Ever since she saw her professor bludgeon himself to death with a hammer a few days prior, she's been seeing people invisible to everyone else, and they have the most menacing smiles on their faces.  After having a screaming fit, Laura suddenly kills herself, wearing an unsettling smile.  That's when Rose's life takes a turn for the crazy, as she begins to see the figures too.

It's a pity that "Smile" is such a dud.  It starts out with such promise.  The first act is harrowing because Finn understands that long takes and obscured figures the heroine can't see can raise the nape hairs.  He also knows the value of silence and stillness.  Waiting for something to happen increases the terror.

There are a few problems, though.  Chief among them is Susie Bacon.  She can't act, and her inability to get the audience to identify with her exposes the seams in the plot.  In "Halloween," the fact that Laurie Strode keeps throwing away the knife is irrelevant because we're more concerned about her safety than her logic.  That key connection is missing, and that's because Rose is so boring.  She's outacted by virtually everyone around her.

Not that "Smile" has an especially well-written story.  It's derivative, sure, but in this genre that's shouldn't come as any surprise.  But it doesn't hold itself together.  Tension and terror are replaced by a lot of running around and utter nonsense as Rose plays Sherlock Holmes.  And whenever she tries to explain to someone what's going on, be it her boring fiancee Trevor (Usher) or her former/current therapist Dr. Madeline Northcutt (Weigert), she blows it.  Either from stupidity or by making a complete ass of herself.

I understand that "Smile" is a feature length sequel to a short film that Finn made in 2020 (Caitilin Stasey, the star of the short, reprises her role as the unfortunate Laura).  That doesn't surprise me.  This is a good idea for film, but Finn has trouble spinning it out to feature length.  Once he establishes the set up, he doesn't know where to take the concept.

And that's the problem.

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