“Smile” is a horror movie that puts just about everything — the highly effective creep factor, its well-executed albeit familiar shock tactics, and its intertwined theme of shock and suicide — before the opening credits. In a psychiatric emergency ward, hardworking and dedicated therapist Dr. Rose Cotter (Susie Bacon), talks to a woman whose soul seems to have gone to hell and never recovered. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stacey), and she has been described, in colors that still make sense despite her extreme panic, the visions she had that no one else could.
You see faces – or rather a soul, a SomethingIt appears in people’s faces. She can feel it’s lurking. The signature of the soul is a face staring at her with an evil grin, a frightening grin of the damned. Describing all this, Laura is so distraught that she begins to convulse. Then the doctor turned around and saw a flower vase smashed on the floor, and Laura disappeared. but not! She’s there, and in her hand is a shard of pottery. and now she who smiles, as she digs and scrapes the shell in her neck, slashing her throat in slow, bloody motion. Put on a happy face!
The demons that Laura was seeing did not die with her. That night Rose returned to her big, cool, fashionable house by the woods, and after she poured herself a glass of wine and sat in the semi-darkness, she saw the same thing as Laura. A face shrouded in shadow. The more I look at him, the more I realize he’s smiling.
The smile, as a sign of obsessive fear, goes back a long time. Just think of Jack-‘o-lanterns and the Joker, or the lira that flashed across the mottled face of Regan MacNeil from Linda Blair, or the rictus smile in a movie like “Insidious” or the movie that inspired her, the brilliant 1962-budget bizarre show “Carnival of Souls” “. Drawing on films like “Hereditary,” “Following,” and “Strangers,” writer-director Parker Finn for the first time turns the human smile into a fearsome vector of the shadow world of evil. The movie has a shivering quality that I thought, for example, that “Black Phone” lacked. However, I wish ‘Smile’ was more willing to be… suggestive.
Laura, who is slitting the throat, was traumatized in the past: she watched a professor commit suicide before her eyes. And the she He committed suicide in front of Rose. Do you feel a pattern here? The movie fills in that pattern, and once that happens, we get the hang of it, “Smile” turns, in its form, into a rather thrilling story about unraveling the mystery of an ancient curse.
If you’re haunted by visions of people smiling at you, but no one else, the world will think you’re crazy, and a lot of the drama in “Smile” revolves around Rose looking like a wizard who’s out of her mind—who doesn’t mind. Likening the neurasthenic Genevieve Bogold, Susie Bacon creates an impressive spectrum of anxiety, drawing the audience into her nightmare. It makes sense that Rose, along with her ex-police officer boyfriend (Kyle Galner), would turn herself into a detective, since that’s what the (at least) good therapists are. And she has had a primal trauma of her own: her mother’s suicide, which we glimpse in the film’s opening moments. “Smile” raises hereditary the idea that emotional and psychological demons transmitted through families are the ghosts of our real lives. But in this case, it’s a huge metaphor: literally, devoid of nuance, explained (at the climax) with a demon scraping off her skin, you’d better get into your skin.
There’s a good scene at nephew Rose’s seventh birthday party, where the usual singing of “Happy Birthday” melts the movie into ecstasy, and the child unwraps a present that stops the party dead in its tracks. But I wanted to see three more scenes with that drama — especially in a 115-minute movie. “Smile” will probably be a hit, because it’s a horror movie that’s delivered without you feeling cheated. At 90 minutes, however, and with fewer repetitions, it was perhaps a more creative film. (And why “Lollipop,” the Chordettes’ 1958 hit, played during the closing credits? It’s one of my favorite songs, but has nothing to do with anything in the movie.) However, let’s give credit to “Smile” for taking a deep dive. In the metaphysics of the smile of terror. The nature of a smile is that it draws you into contact with the person who is smiling. This is why the powers that be after Rose are more than just bogeymen. That’s why it looks like it was meant for her.
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