Smile (2022)

★★★
The bottomless well of inspiration that is 2002's The Ring (itself a remake of the Japanese original Ringu) strikes again with Smile, an effective and scary horror movie that has several really good moments of terror. The story is interesting enough. It's a mystery featuring a main character racing against the clock and searching for clues to end the terrifying events going on around her, but the urgency with which writer and director Parker Finn tell this tale slowly gnaws at our natural desire for a positive outcome. As the story progresses, that sort of resolution becomes more and more difficult to attain, as the movie heavily stacks the deck against the heroine. The revelations and temporary respites provide moments of hope, though. The premise, once we understand it, is intriguing, and it logically opens the door to additional obstacles and dangers while staying true to the internal mythology.

Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, Kevin's daughter) is a psychiatrist who finds herself with patient Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey). Laura has a troubled history. She sees people who aren't there. During Laura's final visit, she commits suicide in front of Rose after claiming to see someone or something in the room. Her boss Dr. Desai (Kal Penn) gives her time off to deal with the trauma. Soon Rose starts having hallucinations, and over the next few days they become more frightening and frequent. Her relationships with her fiancé Trevor (Jesse T. Usher) and sister Holly (Gillian Zinser) become strained. In the most horrifying manifestation of her disturbed mind, she accidentally wraps a dead cat as a present for her nephew. Rose starts to look into Laura's background to see if there is any explanation for these recent events.

She does notice a pattern. One of Laura's professors committed suicide in front of her, which caused her to lose her mind and see hallucinations. Not long before that, the professor saw someone commit suicide in front of him, and so on. She resorts to seeking help from her ex-boyfriend and police detective Joel (Kyle Gallner) to see if he can follow the trail back and see how far it goes. With her exhibiting the same symptoms, Rose concludes that she will also succumb to the same fate. Indeed, she imagines people around her telling her she is running out of time. She finally gets a break when Joel discovers one link in the chain that didn't die but is in fact alive and sitting in prison. She visits him and learns how he managed to escape death.

Parker Finn's script not only took inspiration from The Ring, but it also incorporates some of the rules from Final Destination in its revelation that there's a way to cheat death. Those were both good movies, but Finn wasn't content to copy their ideas. He makes this material his own by crafting a genuinely engrossing mystery and staging several jaw-dropping scare sequences that work on their own terms and not because they needed the crutch of other movies to support them. 2008's One Missed Call is an example of how this genre can miss the mark. That movie, also a remake of a Japanese original, had nothing to call its own. There was little attempt by its filmmakers to be creative. It had some okay jump scares, but there was little beyond that. Rose's mental breakdown can be attributed to her ghoulish visions, but her relationship with her now-deceased mother adds gravitas to her plight. It gives the villain an opening to exploit. It gives Rose a reason to overcome her fears.

Smile is solid from the ground up. We buy into the story, which makes the suspense much stronger. I remember how anxious I got towards the end of The Forgotten, the 2004 alien-takeover movie with Julianne Moore. The tension was unbearable. The story built up Moore's character strongly in order to prepare her for a showdown with her son's life and the world at stake. I had a similar feeling here. Sosie Bacon commits to her character and this story in the same way. Her past is fully developed, and her determination to put an end to the horror is motivated not just to stop the chain of suicides but also to purge the anguish that has accumulated within her due to her mother's death. Bacon, in her first major starring role, proves to be adept at occupying the center of a sinister plot. I don’t know if she plans to branch out or find her calling as a Scream Queen, but if this movie is any indication, she has the goods to go far either way.

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