smile please movie review

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Smile Please

Nandini Joshi, an award-winning photographer, is going through a personal crisis. Even as her busy husband and stubborn daughter continue to neglect her, Nandini struggles to find a sense of... Read all Nandini Joshi, an award-winning photographer, is going through a personal crisis. Even as her busy husband and stubborn daughter continue to neglect her, Nandini struggles to find a sense of purpose and dignity. Will she ever rediscover the lost verve for life? Nandini Joshi, an award-winning photographer, is going through a personal crisis. Even as her busy husband and stubborn daughter continue to neglect her, Nandini struggles to find a sense of purpose and dignity. Will she ever rediscover the lost verve for life?

• Vikram Phadnis
• Irawati Karnik
• Mukta Barve
• Lalit Prabhakar
• 9 User reviews
• 1 win & 2 nominations

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• Jul 30, 2021
• July 19, 2019 (United States)
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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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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: 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 please.

Directed by Vikram Phadnis

Nandini Joshi, an award-winning photographer, is going through a personal crisis. Even as her busy husband and stubborn daughter continue to neglect her, Nandini struggles to find a sense of purpose and dignity. Will she ever rediscover the lost verve for life?

Lalit Prabhakar Mukta Barve Prasad Oak

Director Director

Vikram Phadnis

Producer Producer

Sanjay Chhabria

Alternative Title

ยิ้มหน่อยนะ ที่รักของฉัน

Releases by Date

19 jul 2019, releases by country.

• Theatrical U

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Review by Luke Thorne ★★★★

Vikram Phadnis’s drama about a photographer who is going through a mid-life crisis. Starring Mukta Barve, Lalit Prabhakar and Prasad Oak. In Marathi with English subtitles.

Smile Please is a remake of the English language film Still Alice, which deservedly won Julianne Moore the Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Actress - and the final product is a very decent one.

The movie sees Mukta Brave give a very good performance in her part as Nandi Joshi, the photographer who is finding it really hard after being diagnosed with early on-set dementia. She suits her role very well, acting like she is determined to make the most of the time she has left.

Elsewhere, there are decent performances…

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Movie Review: Smile Please

Smile Please Devesh Sharma , Jul 17, 2019, 19:33 IST

Smile please.

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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.

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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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Smile Please (2019)

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Nandini Joshi, an award-winning photographer, is going through a personal crisis. Even as her busy husband and stubborn daughter continue to neglect her, Nandini struggles to find a sense of purpose and dignity. Will she ever rediscover the lost verve for life?

Vikram Phadnis

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Lalit Prabhakar

Mukta Barve

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In this story of two brothers, Rishi is lazy and wants riches without lifting a finger, while Rocky knows the value of hard work. Rishi is in love with Riya, and Rocky has fallen for Riya's sister Misha, but the women have been forbidden to see the brothers because their father is offended by Rishi's work ethic. When Rocky realizes he's being judged by his brother's actions, comedy ensues as he goes to extreme measures to win the father over.

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Smile Please movie review: Laugh off this lamenting kiss

Director: Raghu Samarth

Cast: Gurunandan, Kavya Shetty, Rangayana Raghu, Srinivas Prabhu, Sudha Belawadi, Girish Shivanna

After all that talks that this one is a laugh riot with a wholesome 127 minutes of entertainment meant for only adults, it eventually turns out to be another ‘disaster’ as it hardly evokes any smiles, and become another ‘laughing’ stock in the end.

Drawing inspiration from endless movies wherein the protagonist suffers from a deadly disease with no cure and that death is certain, he decides to do something sensible before he bids adieu. In this version, the central character Manu portrayed by Gurunandan, has taken up to himself to change the serious life of his uncle’s family with a smile.

With an old and tested formula, the director tries to cash in on the previous grand success of Gurunandan as the innocent Raju in ‘First Rank Raju’ but Manu does not even manage to score the minimum passing marks in this the smiling test. During the entire two plus hours, there are hardly couple of instances when the audience are forced to laugh at the situational humour; one is definitely when the definition of love is derived by one of the supporting character in the film. Well, love as derived in the film is the result of hormones and affection. Isn’t it something to die with laughter!

Mostly shot indoors apart from a couple of songs and scenes, ‘Smile Please’ should have had a tagline saying ‘with a kiss’. Wondering about the kiss, then do patiently wait till the climax to witness the rare ‘lip-lock’ scene. It does bring some smile in the end.

When Manu decides to marry followed with 100 failed selections for a bride, his mother sends him to her elder brother’s house, hoping that he would help find her son a suitable bride. Whereas, he in turn solves the serious problems among the members in the house and slowly brings the much needed smile in their life. By now, the audience are made aware of his deadly disease and his last wish is bring a smiling change in all their life.

Apart from the beautiful presence of Kavya Shetty and the kissing scene, Gurunandan has tried his best but with the predictable plot and weak screenplay, it is nothing but a challenge to smile after watching this one.

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

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‘Smile’ Review: Parker Finn’s Supernatural Take on Trauma Will Make You Grimace and Grin

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The phrase “ smile through the pain” takes on a menacing new meaning in “Smile,” as Parker Finn uses an internationally recognized symbol of happiness to elicit fear and evil as part of the film’s exploration of trauma. A smile is nothing more than a mask, and the real horror arises from the true intention behind it.

Sosie Bacon stars as Rose Cotter, a doctor who works in an emergency psychiatric unit and has carried a heavy burden since she witnessed her mother’s suicide at ten years old. Her mental health begins to deteriorate after she assesses a young woman named Laura (Caitlin Stasey) who is brought in for witnessing a suicide. Frantic and begging for someone to believe her, Laura tells Rose that she is being taunted by a being that only she can see; one that smiles and changes its appearance all while delivering a death threat. She then kills herself right in front of a frozen Rose, who later discovers that whatever entity influenced this patient has now latched itself onto her.

Finn fleshes out Rose’s character with backstories and glimpses into the relationships with her boss, her mother, her fiance, and her older sister. Rose’s emotional turmoil is visually engrossing as a result of Bacon’s impressively frenetic performance. As Rose grapples with disturbing hallucinations and the inability to trust those around her, she fluctuates between moments of mania and disconnection. This spectrum of vulnerable paranoia and fear allows Finn to tackle the multilayered complexity of mental health as Rose attempts to convince those around her that what she is experiencing is real.

While this is a tiresome (although realistic) trope in horror, these rapidly changing emotional states allow Bacon’s acting to shine. Feeling alone, despite the care from her therapist (Robin Weigert), Rose finds a sliver of solace in a police officer and former flame, Joel (Kyle Gallner), who helps her piece together the unsettling lineage of this supernatural being’s victims. While the specifics of the monster are hidden, its execution method and purpose are both revealed within a storyline that is sadly traditional and insipid in its structure.

In order to convey Rose’s mental and emotional downward spiral, Finn utilizes an array of strong camera angles that suggest the lack of consistency in her newfound reality. Slowly rotating the camera ninety degrees, inverting the camera completely upside down, invasive close-up shots on the characters’ faces, and beautiful aerial shots all provide an ominous tone with the eerie feeling of being studied and hunted.

The minimalist production design, courtesy of Lester Cohen, focuses on the horrific mental state of its characters instead of painting a typical horror film aesthetic with gothic or dark features. However, there are certain color palettes that nicely symbolize the instability of Rose’s inner mind and physical surroundings. For example, the hospital where she works dons light pink walls (a nod to an old study that found the shade Bake-Miller Pink to reduce aggression) while Rose often wears blue outfits, a color often representing sadness

The plot of “Smile” is exhaustingly reminiscent of other horror predecessors such as “It Follows,” “The Ring,” “Oculus,” and even “Final Destination.” Finn elaborates on a contagious approach to death by factoring in trauma and how grief and depression can have a ripple effect, but the story does not entirely feel like its own beast. To enhance the film’s already heavily pronounced themes, composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer creates a strong soundscape of playfulness and dread which perfectly compliments the juxtaposition used throughout the film’s 116 minute running time.

The sound design and music are as unnerving as the graphic death scenes, but unfortunately come with excessive amounts of jump scares. And the special effects team from Amalgamated Dynamics constructs truly searing imagery that will both shock and delightfully disgust, especially in the third act. Their grisly prosthetic work and creative monster design have a corporeal surrealism which will have horror fans grinning from ear to ear.

“Smile” navigates unhealed trauma through a supernatural lens and mischievous juxtaposition, despite feeling like a shadow of other stories. With rare moments of dark comedy and irony, he is able to expose the forceful nature of society’s expectation to be happy and presentable despite the suffering that may lurk under one’s skin. Overall, “Smile” delivers a captivating and claustrophobic mental hellscape that will cause one to both grimace and grin.

Paramount will release “Smile” in theaters on Friday, September 30.

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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 promises viewers will leave with terrified faces

Anchored by a great performance by sosie bacon, parker finn's feature debut is impressively unnerving—if you're up for it.

Make sure the liquor cabinet at home is well stocked, because you might just want a stiff drink after seeing Smile . The feature debut of writer-director Parker Finn, expanded from his SXSW award-nominated short Laura Hasn’t Slept , is designed to work your last nerves … in a good way, if such a thing is possible. It may take time and repeated viewings to be sure just how good or bad Smile is as a movie, but as a scare delivery device, it is damned effective. (Trigger warning: anyone who cannot bear seeing harm done to pets should probably avoid it.)

At least until the climax escalates its stakes, Finn’s debut seems like it was pretty cost-effective, too, since the movie’s primary threat is a malevolent presence which mostly disguises itself as one of Stanley Kubrick’s most famous shots as a director. You know the one: head tilted down, eyes looking up at camera, and mouth grinning as wide as the Joker. Jack Torrance, Alex DeLarge, and Private Pyle now have company.

Smile follows in the J-horror subgenre of “lethal chain letter” films like The Ring and The Grudge , where an unstoppable curse gets passed along from one doomed person to the next. In this case, the victim-hopping, smiling presence drives a person into violent suicide, always in front of a witness who within a week becomes its next victim. The most effective scares involve variations on Hideo Nakata’s best one in Dark Water , where a character suddenly realizes there’s a scary thing right beside or behind them, and slowly, grudgingly turns to look at it, only to find it’s even worse than imagined.

Psychiatrist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a doctor so noble her fiancé mentions she’d work for free if she had to, becomes its latest target when an emergency patient (Caitlin Stasey, so good as the crazy aunt in Lucky McKee’s Kindred Spirits ) slices open her own neck in front of her—without flinching, no less. Rose is already dealing with enough residual trauma from her pushy, perfect-parent-in-training sister (Gillian Zinser), but the woman’s grim-faced death in her office prompts the early stages of a breakdown. Consequently, nobody believes her when she starts seeing the smile herself, least of all her conservative supervisor Dr. Desai (a subdued Kal Penn).

Creepy smiles have been a staple of scary cinema at least since Conrad Veidt inspired the creation of the Joker in The Man Who Laughs . As a recent viral stunt by the Smile team at a baseball game showed, the evil-infused expression can be particularly effective even at a distance, as occasionally happens in the film. The score, by Cristobal Tapia de Veer ( The White Lotus ) does the rest of the work, building crescendos of droning noises and crying sounds into tempests of insanity that cut off at just the right moment. It helps set the mood that Rose, even when pursued by an evil presence, keeps her house lights set at extra dim and her phone ringer at extra loud.

There’s some comic relief, but it’s very deadpan, such as when a secondary character gets unduly excited by his vegan meal. It may ease the tension to realize that the demon/spirit/whatever is apparently a fan of exposition, and doesn’t appear whenever Rose is actively learning information that furthers the plot. The moment she gets any downtime, though, watch the hell out.

Bacon is onscreen in nearly every scene, and she makes Rose’s journey from trauma counselor to traumatized entirely convincing. Though she comes from acting royalty—the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgewick—there’s no actorly vanity here. Emotionally she leaves it all on the table. Kyle Gallner, currently great on Hulu as an aggressive criminal in Dinner In America , goes wonderfully in the other direction here, as Rose’s understanding ex who conveniently happens to be a cop. His character stands in contrast to Jessie T. Usher as Rose’s fiancé, who’s nice but largely ineffectual, but to the film’s credit, it casually centers an interracial couple without commentary or awkwardness.

Though much of the special makeup involves typical blood and guts, along with the kind of minor digital tweaks to victims’ smiles that Soundgarden employed back in the music video for “Black Hole Sun,” the effects team at Amalgamated Dynamics puts together some truly disturbing imagery for the film’s final third. Smile is unable to resist the temptation of a potential sequel, but Finn delivers an effective resolution nonetheless. Tying the evil force to lingering trauma—and having to smile through the worst of it—is the movie’s most potent weapon, and what ultimately differentiates it from predecessors like Final Destination or Oculus . It’s obvious that Finn draws heavily from his own favorites, but Smile suggests that their skill and effectiveness have successfully been passed along to him.

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Smile Please

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'Smile' review: Does one superbly scary scene make it worth watching?

The concept of a curse has given rise to some of the most nerve-rattling horror cinema of the last decade. Using this conceit, Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Natalie Erika James's Relic both took the idea of inheritance to places horrifying yet humane. Skipping in their footsteps comes Smile , which sheds their grungy indie veneer for a slick spin on the trope. But can it satisfy on the scares promised with a beaming ad campaign ?

On its face, Smile has a terrific setup: A witness to heinous violence is stalked by a corporeal curse that brings on trauma, terror, derision, and ultimately death. It’s like The Ring , but instead of creepy kids, there’s a wretched grin that follows and dooms you. Sadly, this cool concept crumbles under the weight of a major screenwriting problem — our hero is the movie's least interesting character. 

Smile needs a Final Girl worth watching.

Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is plagued by a mysterious curse that stalks her with sinister smiles, but she’s far from thrilling. In the vein of folk horror, she’s the rational metropolitan figure in her role as a well-respected therapist. And she's a noble one at that, working at a struggling hospital and caring for patients even if they can't pay her a fat hourly fee. But Rose's goodness doesn't make her as instantly compelling as writer/director Parker Finn might hope.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the characters around Rose get to have, well, character . Her sister Holly (a cuttingly funny Gillian Zinser) is a nightmare of a suburban housewife, the wine-swigging cliche who complains about parenting in between backhanded compliments. Holly’s husband (Nick Arapoglou) matches her energy as a succinctly snobby doofus whose crass commentary and easy greediness make for grim but solid punchlines. At the hospital, Kal Penn brings flushed concern as Rose's colleague, while Kyle Gallner plays a sensitive, slightly broody cop. Judy Reyes from Scrubs even pops up for an emotional sequence riddled with anger and grief. They all bring color, while Rose is devotedly beige, even as Bacon hurls herself into the frenzied physicality of fear and slippery shrieks of terror.

It's not that being a nice good person is inherently boring. Final Girls like Halloween 's Laurie Strode and Scream' s Sidney Prescott are also good girls, but each has a bit of attitude that signals she can stand up for herself when push comes to stab. Smile dips into the slasher subgenre with its gesture at this Final Girl trope, yet Finn never gives Rose the essential verve she needs to make us believe she has some fight in her. Without this salty contrast, Rose feels too vague and unreal, lacking the human complexity that makes for a compelling horror heroine. This distance means that as her smiling slasher closes in, her battle for survival earned laughter from the audience, not screams.

A scene stealer gives Smile its best scare.

The bigger problem for Smile might be that Bacon is outshined in the inciting incident. That unnerving smile you've seen plastered across promo posters (and in the image above) belongs to Caitlin Stasey, who delivers a frightening and full arc in one all-too-brief sequence.

College student Laura Weaver (Stasey) comes to Rose with a story too wild to be believed. The battered girl moves with heavy fatigue yet is electrifyingly on edge, hinting at an offscreen battle that has robbed her of sleep and peace. Desperation radiates from her dark eyes as she spills nonsensical claims about an entity that "looks like people" and wears their skin "like a mask." Stasey is riveting in her weariness and bewilderment, and nerve-rattling as she leaps into wails of terror over something no one else can see. Few screams in a horror movie have given me chills, but Stasey's had me goose-pimpled and trembling. Then, just like that, the smile slides across her face, too broad, perfectly jarring.

In a few short minutes, Stasey has made herself an iconic horror figure. Regrettably, nothing in Smile is as sensationally scary as this early sequence.

Smile relies on jump scares and gore.

Maybe you're not watching horror in search of someone to root for. Perhaps you just want some mindless fun and frights. Well, if that's the case, you're in luck; Smile is braced with impressively gory sequences of inventive mutilations and gruesome deaths. The central smile gag works to varying degrees depending on the actor putting it on, but is surprisingly — and disappointingly — sparing in its use. Still, these freaky facial distortions build to a climax that reveals a nightmarish creature that's not exactly unique but is nonetheless terrifically scary to behold.

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However, too many of the attempted thrills in the movie are just jump scares: a sinister figure revealed in a dark corner, a loud sound inciting panic at a mundane occurrence, like cracking open a can of cat food. Finn does a fine job of setting up these small shocks, so that even if you anticipate them, the payoff will make you jump. And while this can be fun, his heavy dependency on these frightening flourishes feel cheap and flimsy without a roiling boil of tension to keep the momentum going.

This is the great tragedy of Smile . It's not the grisly tale of a therapist who followed her patient down a dark path, but of a concept wasted on jump scares and a boring protagonist. There are moments of promise, like a recurring motif about ringing telephones and what they ultimately mean to Rose. Plus, Finn ambitiously dabbles in different horror tropes with his folk-horror culture clash, his slasher Final Girl, and a clever curse that transforms every building into a haunted house. But he fails to create a heroine we frightfully feel bound to, which leaves Smile little more than a creepy watch. It could have been the kind of sinister flick that follows you home, slipping through the door, up the stairs, and curling up deep inside your head, daring you to sleep. Instead, Smile feels as disposable as a candy wrapper.

Smile opens in theaters Sept. 30.

Topics Film

Kristy Puchko is the Film Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter, who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers, and had her work published on RogerEbert.com, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. A member of the Critics Choice Association and GALECA as well as a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes, Kristy's primary focus is movies. However, she's also been known to gush over television, podcasts, and board games. You can follow her on Twitter.

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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’

by Tasha Robinson

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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Release date: 17 december, 2004 -->, smile please movie.

Hrithik Roshan, Ameesha Patel, Gurmeet Choudhary & others at Muhurat of Film Smile Please

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