Main cast: Sosie Bacon (Dr Rose Cotter), Jessie T Usher (Trevor), Kyle Gallner (Joel), Robin Weigert (Dr Madeline Northcott), Caitlin Stasey (Laura Weaver), Judy Reyes (Victoria Muñoz), Gillian Zinser (Holly), Kal Penn (Dr Morgan Desai), and Rob Morgan (Robert Talley)
Director: Parker Finn

Smile is the horror genre triumph story of the year, a modestly budgeted film that makes a huge killing in the box office and would no doubt spawn half a dozen sequels in the coming years.

Watching it is a pretty morose experience, though. It has a potentially interesting story, but the execution is very derivative: jump scares, deliberately dark corridors, and mystery box twists and turns introduced as pseudo-jump scares rather than as organic components of the mystery. It’s a modern day generic horror film, in other words.

This one is about a curse… or a monster, as this movie can’t seem to make up its mind as to what it is. Anyway, the thing works by taking over someone, getting that someone to smile as they commit suicide in front of another person, and then somehow passing on the curse or whatever to that traumatized person, who will then smile and commit suicide in front of another person before the week is out.

This angle could have been interesting, but don’t bother hoping to find out any detail about why it is happening. Maybe it’s all a cosmic joke, or an alien experiment, who knows—a sequel is probably in the works already to explain the origins of this thing, if the pattern displayed by past “box-office smash hit” horror franchises is anything to go by.

The publicity materials claim that this movie is about exploring one’s grief and trauma, but I don’t see that here.

Dr Rose Cutter, the therapist that ends up inheriting the curse or whatever it is from a patient, walks around seeing things and reacting to jump scares throughout the whole film, but there is no actual effort to actually deconstruct or explore the psychology of grief, unless I count screaming and shrieking and finally succumbing to the inevitable twist of the movie as such. Spoiler: I don’t, let’s not be silly now.

This movie is an expanded remake of a 11-minute short film, and it’s obvious that writer and director Parker Finn’s idea of filling up the extra screen time is to use all the tired and overused tricks of other similarly formulaic modern day horror franchises.

So yes, this is a formulaic crowd-pleaser if one enjoys jump scares in dark places and pointless twists and turns, but other folks may find this movie dreary and plodding instead.