{"id":55387,"date":"2022-10-03T18:43:28","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T22:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=55387"},"modified":"2022-10-03T18:43:32","modified_gmt":"2022-10-03T22:43:32","slug":"smile-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2022\/10\/smile-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Smile \u2013 Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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            I\u2019ll start off this review with a compliment: the people tasked with advertising the new horror movie \u201cSmile\u201d did a really good job. For months, I had been successfully unnerved by the various posters, commercials, and trailers for this movie that conditioned me to avert my eyes to the slightest hint of a creepy smile. In hindsight, I probably should have known something was wrong when the film\u2019s All Audiences green-band trailer was much scarier than its Restricted red-band. While the red-band trailer showcased the film\u2019s gore and gave away jump scares, the green-band just abruptly cut to a smile and then ended, leaving me with a shock that I didn\u2019t have time to process, yet undeniably stayed with me. The film, of course, could not claim the same brevity, wasting 115 minutes of my time failing to live up to the promise of even its print ads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The story follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, trying as hard as she can to make this flat protagonist memorable). She\u2019s the best psychologist at her hospital, even though she\u2019s a bit of a mess herself, with some unresolved childhood trauma and difficulties navigating the medical bureaucracy embodied by her boss Dr. Desai (Kal Penn, wasted in an insignificant role). The day-to-day hardships are challenging, but she can handle them. The darkness in her past\u2026 is best left suppressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            One day, Rose is tasked with attending to the raving Laura (Caitlin Stasey, whose eyes and mouth are skillfully expressive, even before the horror elements kick in). The poor medical student has been seeing haunting smiles everywhere ever since she witnessed a suicide a few days ago, curiously by a person who was also smiling, who had also seen a suicide by a smiling person a few days earlier. Soon it\u2019s Rose that has witnessed a suicide and now she\u2019s seeing unnatural smiles. The condition affects her relationship with her fianc\u00e9 Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinser) and is basically ruining her life while also threatening to end it. Inconveniently, the only person who believes that Rose isn\u2019t crazy is her ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner). Can Rose find a way to break the apparent chain, maybe by confronting her own demons?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            This movie doesn\u2019t have an original bone in its body. The \u201cchain of victims\u201d element is ripped off from \u201cIt Follows\u201d and \u201cThe Ring,\u201d and a particularly derivative scare is cribbed from the latter. The emphasis on confronting childhood trauma brings to mind \u201cHereditary\u201d and \u201cThe Night House\u201d without the atmospheric elements that made those movies work. A scene at a birthday party had me muttering, \u201cOh, just like \u2018Fatal Attraction.\u2019\u201d Even the smiling was the basis for scares in \u201cTruth or Dare\u201d from 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            But the biggest sin of \u201cSmile\u201d is that it just isn\u2019t scary. The movie has to rely on fakeout jump scares like a burglar alarm and even opening a can of cat food because it knows it can\u2019t pull off scenes with actual danger or violence. A bad dream sequence can\u2019t be taken seriously because Rose would never act that way. And the smiling is never handled with the expert timing implied by the film\u2019s advertising. Actually, there is one horror element the movie does do right, and that\u2019s the score. If you stay through the credits, you\u2019ll hear some properly pulse-pounding music. The problem, of course, is that you\u2019d have to spend even more time on this movie that has already wasted so much. My mouth was in a bored frown throughout most of this movie, it wasn\u2019t screaming or laughing and it definitely wasn\u2019t smiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grade: D<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSmile\u201d is rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language. Its running time is 115 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver             I\u2019ll start off this review with a compliment: the people tasked with advertising the new horror movie \u201cSmile\u201d did a really good job. For months, I… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":55388,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[1762],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55387"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55389,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55387\/revisions\/55389"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}