• Director: Parker Finn
• With: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert, Kal Penn, Caitlin Staisey, Gillian Zinser, Rob Morgan, Judy Reyes, Kevin Keppy, Marti Matulis
• Music by: Cristobal Tapia de Veer
• Duration: 1h55
• Studio: Paramount Pictures
• Rating: 7/10

Synopsis:

Having spent years trying to flee her own childhood trauma by working her fingers to the bone, compassionate psychiatrist Dr Rose Cotter is used to treating the most damaged and vulnerable members of society. Laura’s puzzling case, however, is a different story. And as unsuspecting Dr Cotter attempts to rationalise the dreadful delusions of the deeply disturbed young woman, hair-raising encounters with the unexplained cause the therapist to reconsider. Now she is losing her grip on reality. Can Rose deal with the ugly past and confront the smile, the unsettling grin of death?

Review:

Combine ‘Truth or Dare’ with ‘It Follows’ and you get Smile! A psychological horror movie about a demonic presence that latches on a susceptible host, who craves trauma and who manifests itself through eerie smiles from people and that shows itself by dead people, known to its host.

Yes that’s what the movie’s about… so that’s why it has that same feel like the two previously mentioned movies (especially It Follows, maybe the demons even know each other?)

Sosie Bacon (yes, daughter of…) plays Rose Cotter, a psychologist who suffers from her own childhood trauma and who’s about to witness a suicide by one of her patients. The girl, Laura, comes in after having witnessed a suicide herself a week before. And ever since that suicide she sees weird things and claims to be followed by an entity, only she can see, that says she’s about to die soon. Before Rose can do anything about it, the girl kills herself by cutting her own throat.

From that moment on Rose’s world starts to fall apart and her life is in a steep decline because she starts seeing things no one else can see. She sees her dead mother with an eerie smile on her face in the darkest corners of her house, she hears her name being whispered and the thing tries to get in her head by manifesting in visionlike images where people get that eerie smile in front of her.

No one believes her and she starts to get alienated from everyone around her. Her mental health is declining, sleep deprived she starts looking for answers and a solution. The only person helping her is Joel, her ex-boyfriend and a cop. But will they be able to stop the demon before it gets to Rose?

I’ll be honest, I had high hopes for this movie. And it was a good movie with some jump scares that got me good (the one with her sister 😵‍💫) but due to the fact that it reminds me a little too much of It Follows it never fulfilled completely in grasping my attention for the whole movie. It didn’t have the element of surprise It Follows had.

But of course this is a good horror movie and something tells me Parker Finn will try and make a sequel to it and I’ll be ready for it. Who doesn’t love a demon, eerie smiles (really icky eerie smiles!!) and an ending that leaves you flabbergasted?

I think the strength of the movie is how we see a woman go from completely sane to completely of the rails, even though we know what happens around her is real, she just can’t seem to convince others of the danger. Makes you wonder how many people in real life that are deemed insane actually have something real going on that we can’t see nor believe in???