Smile

SMILE is a horror film out in theaters. We are in for a real horror treat with a fantastic sound design and amazing visuals. Movie Review >

The audio alone is more than reason enough to watch Smile in a movie theater. A bit like we saw in [The Black Phone](https://www.heavenofhorror.com/reviews/the-black-phone-2022-horror-movie/), but I think the running time is better used here. The entire cast delivers exactly what they need and in some cases a little more. In addition, there is Kal Penn (Clarice) as her concerned and well-meaning boss, and then Robin Weigert (American Horror Story, [Castle Rock](https://www.heavenofhorror.com/tv/first-trailer-stephen-king-tv-show-castle-rock/) season 2) as her therapist. [Mare of Easttown](https://www.heavenofhorror.com/reviews/mare-of-easttown-review-hbo-max-series/)) as the psychiatrist Rose Cotter. In other words, we are indeed dealing with a horror mystery. The last act in particular is a very extreme experience. In a good way. Just as I was about to leave, new (and rather strange) noises came from the screen [or rather, the surround sound], so most people in the theater stopped in their tracks. And we are in for a real horror treat with a fantastic sound design and visuals that just work perfectly. While I did not scream while watching the movie, I did jump in my seat several times. This creepy smile has also been used in marketing in the US, where people appear here, there, and everywhere with grim smiles.

A demonic presence manifests in survivors of trauma in this grim and unexpectedly poignant debut from Parker Finn.

[Scream](https://www.praguereporter.com/home/2022/1/12/scream-movie-review-2022-requel-a-fun-meta-throwback-to-wes-cravens-original)’s [Kyle Gallner](https://www.praguereporter.com/home/tag/Kyle+Gallner)), an ex from Rose’s past who unexpectedly shows up to investigate Laura’s suicide, we discover that this is some kind of suicide-cycle. [Sosie Bacon](https://www.praguereporter.com/home/tag/Sosie%20Bacon) (daughter of [Kevin Bacon](https://www.praguereporter.com/home/tag/Kevin%20Bacon)) as emergency room psychiatrist Dr. as well as something a little deeper that will haunt you long after the movie is over. But here’s where Smile is different: the “demon” here, in allegorical terms, is a parasite that infects those who witness traumatic events. Rose Cotter, tasked with talking down a disturbed patient Laura ( [Caitlin Stasey](https://www.praguereporter.com/home/tag/Caitlin%20Stasey)) in one of the film’s opening scenes. Unlike other paranormal horror movies, there’s no question whether the demons are “real” in the sense that they can be witnessed by or have an impact on other characters in the film.

A young psychiatrist believes she's being pursued by a malevolent force in this impressive horror feature debut.

[“The Ring” (2002](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/18/movies/film-review-don-t-touch-play-it-could-be-fatal.html)) and the cellphone in [“One Missed Call” (2005)](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/arts/movies/film-in-review-one-missed-call.html). Like the emotional injury they represent, the smiles in “Smile” are — in one case, quite literally — bleeding wounds that can’t be stanched. In that film, the malevolent virus was transferred through sex; here, the medium is suicide, and the bloodier the better. 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. Her friends and family — including a distracted sister (Gillian Zinser), distant fiancé (Jessie T. And pain is something that Rose (Sosie Bacon), a young clinical psychiatrist, understands, having witnessed her mother’s suicide many years earlier.

Admittedly traumatized at an early age after seeing Steven Spielberg's classic film “Poltergeist,” Parker Finn grew up in Bath loving the horror film genre.

I was attempting to use the film language to place you in the anxiety of the character, really make you feel what she’s feeling and hopefully put the audience in this off-kilter place -- sort of boiling with stress -- so that when the moments that hit come, they really hit you hard. I have to tip my hat to the Paramount marketing team, they’ve been nothing short of genius with the marketing on this. It’s also been a marathon of hard work so sometimes it’s hard to kind of stop and smell the flowers because you’re just so deep in it but there have been all of these pinch-me moments all the way through. I’m really excited to finally cross the finish line and release the film this weekend. I’ve heard he’s a big fan of horror films so I really hope he gets the opportunity to see “Smile.” That for me is the best way for audiences to see “Smile.” The imagery, the atmosphere and performances in that film sort of just like tore the roof off my brain, nested inside of there and never left. What stands out about “Smile” is, even though it’s decidedly positioned as horror it transcends the genre with excellent cinematography. I didn’t want to just shoot sort of standard coverage. It’s a film I revisit all of the time. “The Shining” is one of my favorite films of all time. It just sort of grew from there where I was just so interested to see in what new ways a filmmaker could scare me or what new thing I didn’t even know I was scared of until the film showed it to me.

The trailer for Parker Finn's feature film debut Smile enticed the internet and drummed up intrigue for this high-concept horror when it was posted to ...

This film is not for the faint of heart. The original Japanese film that started the franchise, changed J-horror forever, and inspired countless American-Japanese horror remakes, Ringu, has many of the same elements as the American remake but is much more avant-garde and disjointed. The Ring - The other film horror fans have already compared Smile to is the iconic film The Ring. The Hidebehind won the Special Jury Award at the 2019 South by Southwest Film Festival and the Jury Award at the 2019 Portland Horror Film Festival. With the incredible cultural impact this film had, it would be unsurprising to learn filmmaker Parker Finn was inspired by the film's use of psychological stress by taunting the protagonist with their own death. Men - Released earlier in 2022, Men is the newest film by writer and director Alex Garland (Ex-Machina). Laura Hasn't Slept was the inspiration for Smile, and unfortunately, the film seems to have been removed from the internet. [Smile](https://collider.com/smile-review-sosie-bacon-parker-finn/) enticed the internet and drummed up intrigue for this high-concept horror when it was posted to YouTube in June of this year. With the release of Smile's trailer, the two films immediately drew comparisons for their use of supernatural forces that inhabit the bodies of others to stalk their victims. The film has already garnered comparison to popular horror films such as [It Follows](https://collider.com/it-follows-review/) and The Ring for its premise, involving an unseen terror threatening an untimely end. Actor [Kal Penn](https://collider.com/tag/kal-penn/), recognizable to comedy fans as the titular Kumar from Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle and its resulting sequels, plays Dr. Usher](https://collider.com/the-boys-season-4-jessie-usher-violence-comments/), best known for his role as The Flash parallel A-Train on the Amazon Prime series The Boys, has been cast in a supporting role, though he is not shown in the trailer.

A young psychiatrist believes she's being pursued by a malevolent force in this impressive horror feature debut.

[“The Ring” (2002](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/18/movies/film-review-don-t-touch-play-it-could-be-fatal.html)) and the cellphone in [“One Missed Call” (2005)](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/arts/movies/film-in-review-one-missed-call.html). Like the emotional injury they represent, the smiles in “Smile” are — in one case, quite literally — bleeding wounds that can’t be stanched. In that film, the malevolent virus was transferred through sex; here, the medium is suicide, and the bloodier the better. 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. Her friends and family — including a distracted sister (Gillian Zinser), distant fiancé (Jessie T. And pain is something that Rose (Sosie Bacon), a young clinical psychiatrist, understands, having witnessed her mother’s suicide many years earlier.

Rose Cutter (Sosie Bacon), whose visit with a newly admitted patient rapidly turns gruesome. The young woman (Caitlin Stasey), beside herself with fear, ...

“Smile,” a Paramount Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for strong violent content and grisly images, and language. But it still makes “Smile” a cynical and shallow piece of work unlikely to put a you-know-what on too many faces. That’s just one of many derivative elements to “Smile,” a horror movie that makes a few feeble gestures at sliding toward the so-called elevated variety of horror (like a couple upside-down shots that recall the vastly superior “Midsommar”). “Smile" is far from the first to trade on trauma as a plot device but it may do so more than any other film I can remember. “Smile,” of course, isn’t the first film to think trouble can lurk behind a smile. It’s clear that, despite her profession, this has been her way of dealing with trauma since she witnessed the overdose death of her mother as a child.

Smile,” a vividly explicit horror outing, is basically an old-fashioned detective story with a ticking clock.

As Rose goes back 25 years to her dramatic childhood with a suicidal mother and a guilt that will never cease, “Smile” loses momentum. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin and Kyra Sedgwick) is treating psychiatric patients and there’s a particularly loud one screaming he’s about to die. “Smile” begins with a knowing awareness that makes Finn’s film both scary and humorous. That list includes Rose’s live-in lover and fiance Trevor (Jessie T. And then she offs herself, horribly, with a big, weird, scary looking smile. This marks the feature debut for writer-director Parker Finn, who’s adapted his award-winning 2020 Sundance short “Laura Hasn’t Slept.”

That's pretty much the movie right there, but Finn fleshes it out with some dizzying cinematography by Charlie Sarroff, a creepily effective score by Cristobal ...

However, Bacon’s performance as well as Finn’s detailed craft manage to hold tension, and the audience’s attention, for the nearly-two-hour runtime of this horror curio, which is as opaque and somewhat silly as the smiles that drive it. The death curse is like contagious PTSD: Anyone who witnesses the suicide of the person compelled to kill themselves by this “evil spirit” catches the curse and has to pass it on. When Finn delves into the childhood trauma that Rose has yet to make peace with, it is visualized and rendered so literally it’s laughable. But is “Smile” smiling with us as we chuckle at the on-the-nose dialogue, imagery and themes? It’s a technique that Finn liberally abuses in “Smile,” almost to comedic effect. Writer-director Parker Finn’s feature debut, “Smile,” boasts the thinnest of premises based on a laundry list of horror movie trends and tropes, from the historical to the contemporary. [COVID-19 pandemic](https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fcalifornia%2Fcoronavirus-everything-to-know-right-now&data=04%7C01%7Ckevin.crust%40latimes.com%7C52633c0a516544dd252a08d9e81168f0%7Ca42080b34dd948b4bf44d70d3bbaf5d2%7C0%7C0%7C637795983749169191%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=EARyZgH1vGMtlQdur%2F61n5fLiwKXExOWtv3guJOFSn8%3D&reserved=0). [Jamie Lee Curtis](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-full-circle-jamie-lee-curtis-20181018-story.html) has given in the past few years about the “Halloween” franchise). In the way that “Smile” takes on trauma as a source of horror so literally, one wonders if Finn is skewering the trend of ascribing all meaning in horror films to “it’s about trauma” (see: every interview original Final Girl [Robin Weigert](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-st-robin-weigart-deadwood-20190426-story.html), the preeminent portrayer of therapists (see: “Big Little Lies”), as Rose’s own therapist, who speaks to her in soothing, infuriating tones that eventually take on a menacing quality. [Val Lewton](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-14-et-lewton14-story.html) pioneered a technique in the film “Cat People” that’s now referred to as the “Lewton Bus.” If you’ve ever seen a horror movie, you know it: a moment of slowly building tension that culminates in some shrieking noise from a source that is revealed to be harmless but sends the popcorn flying nevertheless — a ringing phone, a home alarm system, the brakes on a bus. Expanding on his 2020 short film “Laura Hasn’t Slept,” Finn inserts the latest hot topic in horror — trauma — into a story structured around a death curse chain, as seen in films like “The Ring,” “It Follows” and “She Dies Tomorrow.” All that’s needed to pass along the curse is a mere smile, but it’s the kind of chin-lowered, eyes-raised toothy grin that communicates something far more devious than friendly.

We're almost out of the slump, and it turned out to not be as bad as expected. In first place this weekend should be Paramount's horror film Smile, which is ...

[Free Guy](/release/rl1158252033/?ref_=bo_at_a)and [Ghostbusters: Afterlife](/release/rl319391233/?ref_=bo_at_a)). Beyond that, there was the Channing Tatum starring, $61.8 million grossing [Dog](/release/rl1831174913/?ref_=bo_at_a), which was a lower key buddy dramedy, and the $57.7 million grossing slapstick-umentary fourquel [Jackass Forever](/release/rl1688896001/?ref_=bo_at_a). [Bros](/release/rl2674688769/?ref_=bo_at_a). Eichner co-wrote the script with director Nicholas Stoller whose film [Neighbors](/release/rl1719109121/?ref_=bo_at_a)is one of the most successful comedies of the past decade with $271 million worldwide. [Halloween Ends](/release/rl2047247873/?ref_=bo_at_a)arrives to kick off the fall/winter blockbuster season and revive the box office, but until then the smaller titles are doing their best to keep the box office afloat. Once planned to come out on Paramount+, Smile was deemed worthy of a theatrical release after strong test screenings, and the critical response is as good as the word from the test audiences, with 82% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes praising it.

Based on his 2020 short film “Laura Hasn't Slept,” Finn inserts the latest hot topic in horror — trauma — into a story structured around a death curse chain, as ...

Finn continually walks a line in “Smile” in which one constantly wonders if the movie is just dumb, or so dumb it’s looped back around to smart again. The main character in “Smile,” Rose Cotter (Bacon), is a therapist who catches the curse from a young woman in the throes of a debilitating mental health crisis (Caitlin Stasey) after witnessing a suicide. It’s a technique that Finn liberally abuses in “Smile,” almost to comedic effect.

September 29, 2022 10:52 PDT - By Sam Mendelsohn - Box Office News. This weekend and next weekend are the last two before Halloween Ends arrives to kick off ...

[Free Guy](/release/rl1158252033/?ref_=bo_at_a)and [Ghostbusters: Afterlife](/release/rl319391233/?ref_=bo_at_a)). Beyond that, there was the Channing Tatum starring, $61.8 million grossing [Dog](/release/rl1831174913/?ref_=bo_at_a), which was a lower key buddy dramedy, and the $57.7 million grossing slapstick-umentary fourquel [Jackass Forever](/release/rl1688896001/?ref_=bo_at_a). [Bros](/release/rl2674688769/?ref_=bo_at_a). Eichner co-wrote the script with director Nicholas Stoller whose film [Neighbors](/release/rl1719109121/?ref_=bo_at_a)is one of the most successful comedies of the past decade with $271 million worldwide. [Halloween Ends](/release/rl2047247873/?ref_=bo_at_a)arrives to kick off the fall/winter blockbuster season and revive the box office, but until then the smaller titles are doing their best to keep the box office afloat. Once planned to come out on Paramount+, Smile was deemed worthy of a theatrical release after strong test screenings, and the critical response is as good as the word from the test audiences, with 82% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes praising it.

A creepfest about a curse that causes killers and victims to sport psychotically joyful smile knows exactly how to get under your skin, one unnerving ...

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. the site of her own original-sin trauma, with the hopes of healing herself in order to rob this monstrosity of its power. Rose’s ex (Kyle Gallner), who happens to be a cop, helps her trace the lineage of that hospital patient back to her trauma, which is connected to a seemingly endless series of suicide-freakout-rinse-repeat. It simply is the manifestation of a viral evil that jumps from host to host, stretching the lips of a victim’s ghostly tormentors — and, eventually, those belonging to the unlucky soul being tortured as well — so far it appears their heads with horizontally cleave itself in half. The Smile is the constant. Then the woman kills herself in front of the doctor.

Smile's director Parker Finn recruited Alien alums Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr for help with the SFX.

After a Zoom meeting, where Finn confessed the two played a huge hand in his childhood and the inspiration to make movies, the artists were all in. I knew very early on that I wanted to use practical effects in the film and told the studio that. Finn says, "There is a visual motif clearly of the smile throughout the film, but I didn’t want anything to become stale. It's Stasey's face, smiling grimly, that catches the eye in a way that makes us feel like Based off of his own 2020 short film Laura Hasn't Slept, Finn wanted to expand on the critically acclaimed short when "...something about the idea kept nagging at [him]." [first teaser trailer](https://collider.com/smile-movie-teaser-trailer-sosie-bacon-caitlin-stasey/) popped up in theaters ahead of legendary sequel [Top Gun: Maverick](https://collider.com/tag/top-gun-maverick/), Smile has been haunting audiences.

The restraint showed by not including any version of "When You're Smiling" in this movie is admirable on several levels.

Yes, it follows, just like "It Follows," one of the chain-of-curses horror movies from which "Smile" draws inspiration. There's more mature attention paid to severe emotional trauma than in your standard horror tale, but "Smile" ultimately overstays its welcome, stretching what should be a 90-minute movie out to the nearly two-hour mark. The kind that make you ask why is this person smiling, especially at a time like this?