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When the horror histories of the 2010s are written, the decade will be associated with trauma metaphors the way the ‘80s are with slasher movies. And although it comes on the cusp of a new decade, the new Paramount wide-release horror movie "Smile" fits right in with its PTSD-induced kin. The difference here is that the monster is barely a metaphor at all: The demon, or evil spirit, or whatever it is—the movie is vague on this point—literally feeds on, and is spread by, trauma.

Specifically, the vague something that dogs Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ) throughout “Smile” likes the taste of people who have witnessed someone else dying by suicide—gruesome, painful, bloody suicide, by garden shears and oncoming trains and the shattered fragments of a ceramic vase in a hospital intake room. That’s where Rose briefly meets Laura ( Caitlin Stasey ), a PhD student who’s brought to the psychiatric emergency ward where Rose works, shaking and terrified that something is out to get her. “It looks like people, but it’s not a person,” Laura explains, saying that this thing has been following her ever since she witnessed one of her professors bludgeoning himself to death with a hammer four days earlier. At the end of the extended dialogue scene that opens the film, Laura turns to Rose with a psychotic grin on her face and proceeds to slit her own throat.

This would unsettle anyone, but it especially bothers Rose given that Rose’s own mother died by suicide many years earlier. That lingering trauma, and the fears and stigma that surround it, form the film’s most intelligent thematic thread: Rose’s fiance Trevor ( Jessie T. Usher ) admits that he’s researched inherited mental illness online, and harsh terms like “nutjobs,” “crazies,” and “head cases” are used to describe mentally ill people throughout the film. The idea that she might not actually be plagued by the same entity that killed Laura, and that her hallucinations, lost time, and emotional volatility might have an internal cause, seems to bother Rose more than the concept of being cursed. The people around Rose, including Trevor, her therapist Dr. Northcott ( Robin Weigert ), her boss Dr. Desai ( Kal Penn ), and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinzer), certainly seem to think the problem is more neurochemical than supernatural—that is, until it’s way too late.

The only one who believes Rose is her ex, Joel ( Kyle Gallner ), a cop who’s been assigned to Laura’s case. Their tentative reunion opens the door to the film’s mystery element, which makes up much of “Smile’s” long, but not overly long, 115-minute run time. The film’s storyline follows many of your typical beats of a supernatural horror-mystery, escalating from a quick Google (the internet-age equivalent of a good old-fashioned library scene) to an in-person interview with a traumatized, incarcerated survivor of whatever this malevolent entity actually is. Brief reference is made to a cluster of similar events in Brazil, opening up the door to a sequel.

“Smile’s” greatest asset is its relentless, oppressive grimness: This is a film where children and pets are as vulnerable as adults, and the horror elements are bloody and disturbing to match the dark themes. This unsparing sensibility is enhanced by Bacon’s shaky, vulnerable performance as Rose: At one point, she screams at Trevor, “I am not crazy!,” then mumbles an apology and looks down at her shoes in shame. At another, her wan smile at her nephew’s birthday party stands as both a bleak counterpoint to the sick grin the entity’s victims see before they die (thus the film’s title), as well as a relatable moment for viewers who have reluctantly muddled their way through similar gatherings in the midst of a depressive episode.

Sadly, despite a compelling lead and strong craft behind the camera—the color palette, in shades of lavender, pink, teal, and gray, is capably chosen and very of the moment—“Smile” is diminished by the sheer fact that it’s not as fresh a concept as it might seem. This is director Parker Finn ’s debut feature as a writer and director, based on a short film that won a jury award at SXSW 2020. To spin that into a non-franchise wide-release movie from a major studio like Paramount within two years—in a pandemic, no less!—is an impressive achievement, to be sure.

But in padding out the concept from an 11-minute short into a nearly two-hour movie, “Smile” leans too heavily not only on formulaic mystery plotting, but also on horror themes and imagery lifted from popular hits like “ The Ring ” and “ It Follows .” David Robert Mitchell ’s 2014 film is an especially prominent, let’s say, influence on “Smile,” which, combined with its placement on the “it’s really about trauma” continuum, make this a less bracing movie experience than it might have been had it broken the mold more aggressively. It does introduce Finn as a capable horror helmer, one with a talent for an elegantly crafted jump scare and a knack for making a viewer feel uneasy and upset as they exit the theater—both advantages for a film like this one. But fans excited to see an “original” horror film hitting theaters should temper those expectations.

This review was filed from the premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 23rd. It opens on September 30th.

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and critic based in Chicago with a speciality in genre cinema. She worked as the News Editor of The A.V. Club from 2014-2019, and as Senior Editor of that site from 2019-2022. She currently writes about film for outlets like Vulture, Rolling Stone, Indiewire, Polygon , and RogerEbert.com.

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Film credits.

Smile (2023)

Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language.

115 minutes

Sosie Bacon as Dr. Rose Cotter

Kyle Gallner as Joel

Caitlin Stasey as Laura Weaver

Jessie T. Usher as Trevor

Rob Morgan as Robert Talley

Kal Penn as Dr. Morgan Desai

Robin Weigert as Dr. Madeline Northcott

Parker Finn

Cinematographer

Charlie Sarroff
Elliot Greenberg
Cristobal Tapia de Veer

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‘Smile’ Review: Grab and Grin

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

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

A relentlessly somber, precision-tooled picture whose frights only reinforce the wit of its premise, “Smile” turns our most recognizable sign of pleasure into a terrifying rictus of pain.

And pain is something that Rose (Sosie Bacon), a young clinical psychiatrist, understands, having witnessed her mother’s suicide many years earlier. So when a hysterical patient (Caitlin Stasey) claims that she’s being stalked by a murderous, shape-shifting entity — and that this specter appeared only after she saw an acquaintance brutally kill himself — Rose is immediately empathetic. What happens next is so horrifying it will not only resurrect old terrors but engender new ones, destabilizing Rose and everyone close to her.

Increasingly convinced that she, too, is going to die in some horrible fashion, Rose is plagued by gruesome memories, nightmarish hallucinations and lost stretches of time. Her friends and family — including a distracted sister (Gillian Zinser), distant fiancé (Jessie T. Usher) and concerned supervisor (Kal Penn) — presume psychological damage. Only her ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), a sympathetic police detective, is willing to help her research anyone who might have had a similar experience. And, crucially, survived.

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. In the past, this has centered on cursed pieces of technology, like the videotape in “The Ring” (2002 ) and the cellphone in “One Missed Call” (2005) . Here, though, death is dealt simply by witnessing an act, and in that sense the movie’s closest cousin may be David Robert Mitchell’s immensely creepy “It Follows” (2015) . In that film, the malevolent virus was transferred through sex; here, the medium is suicide, and the bloodier the better.

Yet this first feature from the writer and director Parker Finn (expanding his 2020 short film, “Laura Hasn’t Slept”) doesn’t feel like a retread: Even the familiar luckless pet seems included more as a wink-wink to the audience than a lazy crib. The jump scares are shockingly persuasive, gaining considerable oomph from Tom Woodruff Jr.’s imaginative practical effects and Charlie Sarroff’s tipsy camera angles. An unexpected color palette sets a dolorous tone without being suffocatingly gloomy, and Bacon’s performance , both shaky and determined, ensures that the very real agony of mental illness and its stigmatization register as strongly as any supernatural pain. Like the emotional injury they represent, the smiles in “Smile” are — in one case, quite literally — bleeding wounds that can’t be stanched.

Smile Rated R for scary teeth and shocking deaths. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.

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Smile Reviews

Despite some of its missteps, the horror film’s theme of inheriting mental illness and walking down a path that you have lived dreading all your life is poignant.

Full Review | Jun 11, 2024

It's not the most original film of recent years... [but] it uses a familiar box of tricks rather well.

Full Review | Jan 3, 2024

If the sight of a person grinning like an idiot is enough to unnerve you, then you might well be the target audience for Smile -- me, I’ll stick with Jack Nicholson’s Joker for my maniacal grimaces.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 28, 2023

“Smile” works on its own terms immersed with Cotter, wound too tight and with people closest to her turning superficial and nonreciprocating; the care and support she shows them and others is unavailable to her.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

Smile got right under my skin in a way I didn’t expect… anxiety inducing moments, & an a completely unhinged performance from Sosie Bacon! This movie really will make you afraid of smiles

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Smile is nothing revolutionary, but it is creepy, and sometimes that’s enough. It’s more memorable than any recent iteration of Paranormal Activity and will certainly be a hit at sleepovers.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

There were some aspects that were interesting but a lot of moments made me roll my eyes. The last twenty minutes got my attention but it was too little, too late at that point.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 30, 2023

I did not have fun watching this. Relying too much on jump scares and not enough pay-off.

Don’t look away. Just keep smiling through it.

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

Smile shows itself as a strange mixture of goldsmithing and cheap jewelry: the more unconscious it is of its own message and the further it is from giving its monsters a total shape (physical or metaphorical), the closer it is to saying something real.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 25, 2023

... Its formal technique transforms a film full of clichés into an average story that manages to make an impact at the right moments. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 20, 2023

Even with the similarities to other films in mind, Smile proves itself to be its own beast of a horror.

Full Review | Jan 28, 2023

Finn uses the strength of his conceit to turn the screws, raising tension through the Ring-like timeline Rose faces and the sheer relentlessness of her supernatural tormentor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 19, 2022

Building a horror film that feels both familiar and invigorating at the same time, Finn’s Smile delivers enough chills to satisfy.

Full Review | Dec 15, 2022

I watched the entire movie through my fingers. Starring Sosie Bacon her constant panic is operatic. She was terrifying in her out-of-control hysteria.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2022

Smile is an intense horror film dealing with survivor’s guilt that exceeds all expectations. By the film’s end, I found my palms sweating — something I’d never experienced.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 30, 2022

A bone-rattling, brain-flipping chiller sure to be ranked highly by true fans of the genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 30, 2022

We see and hear the stifling moods of fear and frustration Finn can evoke and we wish they weren’t yoked to such a nothing-special story.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Nov 22, 2022

I think I can speak for all of us when I say, no one expected Smile to be quite as good as it turned out to be, but it’s such a joy to watch a truly exciting new horror film on the big screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 19, 2022

Finn is a strong visual director, tilting and pivoting the camera and using shadows, upsetting bits of body horror and distortion effects to generate some potent atmosphere. But he struggles in other ways...

Full Review | Nov 16, 2022

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‘Smile’ Review: The Demons Grin Back at You in a Horror Movie With a Highly Effective Creep Factor

A therapist looks like she's losing her mind in a shocker that puts a happy face on trauma.

By Owen Gleiberman

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“ Smile ” is a horror film that sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits. In an emergency psych ward, Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ), a diligent and devoted therapist, is speaking to a woman who sounds like her soul went to hell and never made it back. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stasey), and she describes, in tones that remain rational despite her tremulous panic, the visions she’s been seeing that no one else can.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, Sept. 26, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 115 MIN.

Production: A Paramount Pictures release, in association with Paramount Players, of a Temple Hill Entertainment production. Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Robert Salerno. Executive producer: Adam Fishbach.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Parker Finn. Camera: Charlie Sarroff. Editor: Eeliott Greenberg. Music: Cristobal “Christo” Tapia de Veer.
With: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robert Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan.

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‘smile’ review: sosie bacon stars in a genuinely frightening horror debut.

The actress leads Parker Finn's film about a woman haunted and hunted by her trauma, co-starring Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert and Kal Penn.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Parker Finn ’s disquieting debut Smile transforms a congenial gesture into a threat. Smiles — warm and inviting by nature — mask deeper, more troubling intentions in this harrowing film about a demonic spirit that latches on to its victims’ traumas. The adage about grinning through hard times here takes on a sinister tone.

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Smile Should Smile More

Smile has such a visually powerful concept that it might take a while before you realize the movie is blowing it. After all, what’s more menacing than someone intently staring at you with a big, toothy, frozen, creepy smile? Parker Finn’s debut horror feature, which he based on his own 2020 short film, Laura Hasn’t Slept , recognizes this basic, uncanny concept. And initially, it delivers: Early on, the film is filled with plastered smiles, and Finn uses the motif in interesting ways. Then the inspiration vanishes and Smile settles into the wan, pro forma genre-flick form it so astutely evaded early on.

The premise is generic horror, but the execution, at first, is anything but. The film follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a young doctor working for an emergency psychiatric unit, who one day meets with a highly agitated patient who has witnessed the grisly suicide of her college professor. The professor, we’re told, had an eerie smile on his face before killing himself. Then, sure enough, the patient suddenly starts to grin creepily before promptly slitting her own throat. Rose is spooked, and it’s not long before she starts seeing terrifying visions of smiles and sinister figures lurking in the dark corners of her house. (There’s some sort of buried trauma in her life involving the death of her mother, so we know that will figure into the proceedings eventually.)

The terrifying smile is, of course, not a new idea for the genre: Paul Leni’s 1928 drama The Man Who Laughs worked the motif so effectively that the film was retroactively classified as horror and wound up influencing any number of proper genre flicks. (It also inspired the Joker.) And although Leni’s picture was based on a Victor Hugo novel, this is an inherently cinematic concept. A film built around smiles — in particular a specific type of smile — has to be able to use the human face well.

Smile , for a while, does exactly that. Bacon stands out in particular. The daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, she’s a terrific actor, but there’s a certain malleability to her visage, which director Finn embraces visually. When she’s at work, made up and put together, Rose seems cool and delicately featured. As the story proceeds, the makeup disappears, furrows appear on her brow and bags under her eyes, and Finn seems to shoot her with wider lenses and harsher light — as if to exaggerate her features. Some sort of increased agitation like this is nothing new in horror, of course, but here, the transformation is so extreme that it captures the imagination. It suggests that Rose becomes a different person when she no longer has to put on the proverbial face.

For a film called Smile , which is all about repressed memories and buried horrors, this is a fascinating stylistic idea. And on the evidence solely of the first half hour or so of this movie, Finn will surely be a director to watch. Direct close-ups, with characters basically looking straight at the camera, both add to the unsettling tone of the picture and focus our attention on the slightest movements of their faces. To put it another way, the film teaches us how to watch it. That’s a nifty accomplishment. If only the film didn’t eventually forget its own lessons.

Even a basic glance at the plot gives you some idea of where it’s all headed, although it takes an agonizingly long time before our heroine realizes that she’s being It Follows -ed by smiles — that this is a chain of viral hauntings with each carrier witnessing one ghastly suicide, then, soon enough, unwittingly committing their own. (This is only a spoiler if you happen to be a character in the movie.) Even more irritating is the fact that nobody around Rose — not the doctors, her ex-boyfriend the cop (Kyle Gallner), her seemingly helpful fiancé (Jessie T. Usher), nor her busybody sister (Gillian Zinser) — seems capable of putting two and two together despite the fact that all these suicides appear to be happening in a fairly small community and are well documented. Everybody is so conveniently lunkheaded. Meanwhile, as Rose gradually loses her grip on reality, the film devolves into a series of dream visions, each of which serves to make what’s happening onscreen less and less interesting. (Every time something suspenseful or scary was interrupted to show Rose waking up in her car or whatever, a little piece of me died.)

These are, perhaps, minor narrative gripes. Horror is the one genre in which the audience is allowed to be one step ahead of the characters and things are allowed to not always make sense. But in Smile , it often feels like we’re one whole act ahead of everybody, and that can lead to tedium. More important, the real disappointment comes in the way that the film discards its visual principles and its most exciting conceit: Smile all but abandons the whole smile thing. That feels downright unforgivable.

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‘Smile’ Is Pure, Uncut Arthouse Horror With a Grin (and a Killer Gimmick)

By David Fear

You have to admire a commitment to a bit, especially if you’re a film like Smile and in the possession of a simple, genius, creepier-than-thou conceit. Let’s cut to the chase: Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a therapist working in the psychiatric wing of a hospital. A patient comes in and says that, even since she witnessed her college professor take his own life, she’s been seeing…something only she can see. “It’s not a person,” the young woman says, though whatever “it” is, the entity seems to take the appearance of both strangers and loved ones. “It’s like it wears people’s faces like masks.” She hears voices, too — and these voices have been telling her that she’s going to die very soon.

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The one thing that truly is surprising in Parker’s impressive first movie — here’s hoping that there are many more to come — is the studio logo that opens it. He’s made a scary movie that balances psychological shock therapy with old-fashioned fright, shadowy dread with blunt splatterfest FX, an artsy-fartsy sense of stylistics slapped on to a twisty B-movie scenario. It may open with Paramount name slapped on the beginning, but this is textbook A24 horror by any other name. 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. Curses get passed on like viruses. So do blessings.

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‘Smile’ Review: Parker Finn’s Supernatural Take on Trauma Will Make You Grimace and Grin

Marisa mirabal.

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The phrase “ smile through the pain” takes on a menacing new meaning in “Smile,” as Parker Finn uses an internationally recognized symbol of happiness to elicit fear and evil as part of the film’s exploration of trauma. A smile is nothing more than a mask, and the real horror arises from the true intention behind it.

Sosie Bacon stars as Rose Cotter, a doctor who works in an emergency psychiatric unit and has carried a heavy burden since she witnessed her mother’s suicide at ten years old. Her mental health begins to deteriorate after she assesses a young woman named Laura (Caitlin Stasey) who is brought in for witnessing a suicide. Frantic and begging for someone to believe her, Laura tells Rose that she is being taunted by a being that only she can see; one that smiles and changes its appearance all while delivering a death threat. She then kills herself right in front of a frozen Rose, who later discovers that whatever entity influenced this patient has now latched itself onto her.

Finn fleshes out Rose’s character with backstories and glimpses into the relationships with her boss, her mother, her fiance, and her older sister. Rose’s emotional turmoil is visually engrossing as a result of Bacon’s impressively frenetic performance. As Rose grapples with disturbing hallucinations and the inability to trust those around her, she fluctuates between moments of mania and disconnection. This spectrum of vulnerable paranoia and fear allows Finn to tackle the multilayered complexity of mental health as Rose attempts to convince those around her that what she is experiencing is real.

While this is a tiresome (although realistic) trope in horror, these rapidly changing emotional states allow Bacon’s acting to shine. Feeling alone, despite the care from her therapist (Robin Weigert), Rose finds a sliver of solace in a police officer and former flame, Joel (Kyle Gallner), who helps her piece together the unsettling lineage of this supernatural being’s victims. While the specifics of the monster are hidden, its execution method and purpose are both revealed within a storyline that is sadly traditional and insipid in its structure.

In order to convey Rose’s mental and emotional downward spiral, Finn utilizes an array of strong camera angles that suggest the lack of consistency in her newfound reality. Slowly rotating the camera ninety degrees, inverting the camera completely upside down, invasive close-up shots on the characters’ faces, and beautiful aerial shots all provide an ominous tone with the eerie feeling of being studied and hunted.

The minimalist production design, courtesy of Lester Cohen, focuses on the horrific mental state of its characters instead of painting a typical horror film aesthetic with gothic or dark features. However, there are certain color palettes that nicely symbolize the instability of Rose’s inner mind and physical surroundings. For example, the hospital where she works dons light pink walls (a nod to an old study that found the shade Bake-Miller Pink to reduce aggression) while Rose often wears blue outfits, a color often representing sadness

The plot of “Smile” is exhaustingly reminiscent of other horror predecessors such as “It Follows,” “The Ring,” “Oculus,” and even “Final Destination.” Finn elaborates on a contagious approach to death by factoring in trauma and how grief and depression can have a ripple effect, but the story does not entirely feel like its own beast. To enhance the film’s already heavily pronounced themes, composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer creates a strong soundscape of playfulness and dread which perfectly compliments the juxtaposition used throughout the film’s 116 minute running time.

The sound design and music are as unnerving as the graphic death scenes, but unfortunately come with excessive amounts of jump scares. And the special effects team from Amalgamated Dynamics constructs truly searing imagery that will both shock and delightfully disgust, especially in the third act. Their grisly prosthetic work and creative monster design have a corporeal surrealism which will have horror fans grinning from ear to ear.

“Smile” navigates unhealed trauma through a supernatural lens and mischievous juxtaposition, despite feeling like a shadow of other stories. With rare moments of dark comedy and irony, he is able to expose the forceful nature of society’s expectation to be happy and presentable despite the suffering that may lurk under one’s skin. Overall, “Smile” delivers a captivating and claustrophobic mental hellscape that will cause one to both grimace and grin.

Paramount will release “Smile” in theaters on Friday, September 30.

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'Smile' review: Does one superbly scary scene make it worth watching?

The concept of a curse has given rise to some of the most nerve-rattling horror cinema of the last decade. Using this conceit, Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Natalie Erika James's Relic both took the idea of inheritance to places horrifying yet humane. Skipping in their footsteps comes Smile , which sheds their grungy indie veneer for a slick spin on the trope. But can it satisfy on the scares promised with a beaming ad campaign ?

On its face, Smile has a terrific setup: A witness to heinous violence is stalked by a corporeal curse that brings on trauma, terror, derision, and ultimately death. It’s like The Ring , but instead of creepy kids, there’s a wretched grin that follows and dooms you. Sadly, this cool concept crumbles under the weight of a major screenwriting problem — our hero is the movie's least interesting character.

Smile needs a Final Girl worth watching.

Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is plagued by a mysterious curse that stalks her with sinister smiles, but she’s far from thrilling. In the vein of folk horror, she’s the rational metropolitan figure in her role as a well-respected therapist. And she's a noble one at that, working at a struggling hospital and caring for patients even if they can't pay her a fat hourly fee. But Rose's goodness doesn't make her as instantly compelling as writer/director Parker Finn might hope.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the characters around Rose get to have, well, character . Her sister Holly (a cuttingly funny Gillian Zinser) is a nightmare of a suburban housewife, the wine-swigging cliche who complains about parenting in between backhanded compliments. Holly’s husband (Nick Arapoglou) matches her energy as a succinctly snobby doofus whose crass commentary and easy greediness make for grim but solid punchlines. At the hospital, Kal Penn brings flushed concern as Rose's colleague, while Kyle Gallner plays a sensitive, slightly broody cop. Judy Reyes from Scrubs even pops up for an emotional sequence riddled with anger and grief. They all bring color, while Rose is devotedly beige, even as Bacon hurls herself into the frenzied physicality of fear and slippery shrieks of terror.

It's not that being a nice good person is inherently boring. Final Girls like Halloween 's Laurie Strode and Scream' s Sidney Prescott are also good girls, but each has a bit of attitude that signals she can stand up for herself when push comes to stab. Smile dips into the slasher subgenre with its gesture at this Final Girl trope, yet Finn never gives Rose the essential verve she needs to make us believe she has some fight in her. Without this salty contrast, Rose feels too vague and unreal, lacking the human complexity that makes for a compelling horror heroine. This distance means that as her smiling slasher closes in, her battle for survival earned laughter from the audience, not screams.

A scene stealer gives Smile its best scare.

Caitlin Stasey gives the smile to terrify in "Smile."

The bigger problem for Smile might be that Bacon is outshined in the inciting incident. That unnerving smile you've seen plastered across promo posters (and in the image above) belongs to Caitlin Stasey, who delivers a frightening and full arc in one all-too-brief sequence.

College student Laura Weaver (Stasey) comes to Rose with a story too wild to be believed. The battered girl moves with heavy fatigue yet is electrifyingly on edge, hinting at an offscreen battle that has robbed her of sleep and peace. Desperation radiates from her dark eyes as she spills nonsensical claims about an entity that "looks like people" and wears their skin "like a mask." Stasey is riveting in her weariness and bewilderment, and nerve-rattling as she leaps into wails of terror over something no one else can see. Few screams in a horror movie have given me chills, but Stasey's had me goose-pimpled and trembling. Then, just like that, the smile slides across her face, too broad, perfectly jarring.

In a few short minutes, Stasey has made herself an iconic horror figure. Regrettably, nothing in Smile is as sensationally scary as this early sequence.

Smile relies on jump scares and gore.

Gillian Zinser, Nick Arapoglou, and Matthew Lamb as a terrified family in "Smile."

Maybe you're not watching horror in search of someone to root for. Perhaps you just want some mindless fun and frights. Well, if that's the case, you're in luck; Smile is braced with impressively gory sequences of inventive mutilations and gruesome deaths. The central smile gag works to varying degrees depending on the actor putting it on, but is surprisingly — and disappointingly — sparing in its use. Still, these freaky facial distortions build to a climax that reveals a nightmarish creature that's not exactly unique but is nonetheless terrifically scary to behold.

However, too many of the attempted thrills in the movie are just jump scares: a sinister figure revealed in a dark corner, a loud sound inciting panic at a mundane occurrence, like cracking open a can of cat food. Finn does a fine job of setting up these small shocks, so that even if you anticipate them, the payoff will make you jump. And while this can be fun, his heavy dependency on these frightening flourishes feel cheap and flimsy without a roiling boil of tension to keep the momentum going.

This is the great tragedy of Smile . It's not the grisly tale of a therapist who followed her patient down a dark path, but of a concept wasted on jump scares and a boring protagonist. There are moments of promise, like a recurring motif about ringing telephones and what they ultimately mean to Rose. Plus, Finn ambitiously dabbles in different horror tropes with his folk-horror culture clash, his slasher Final Girl, and a clever curse that transforms every building into a haunted house. But he fails to create a heroine we frightfully feel bound to, which leaves Smile little more than a creepy watch. It could have been the kind of sinister flick that follows you home, slipping through the door, up the stairs, and curling up deep inside your head, daring you to sleep. Instead, Smile feels as disposable as a candy wrapper.

Smile opens in theaters Sept. 30.

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Kristy Puchko is the Film Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter, who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers, and had her work published on RogerEbert.com, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. A member of the Critics Choice Association and GALECA as well as a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes, Kristy's primary focus is movies. However, she's also been known to gush over television, podcasts, and board games. You can follow her on Twitter.

Smile Review

A tense and terrifying look at mental health with a supernatural twist..

Smile will hit theaters on Sept. 30, 2022.

“Smile though your heart is aching; smile even though it's breaking.” Those well-meaning words of comfort couldn’t sound more sinister once you’ve seen Smile , a supernatural psychological horror entry that, while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, still manages to stoke tension every time anyone so much as smirks.

This ruthlessly effective, anxiety-inducing nightmare that tells the horrifying story of Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a therapist who finds her whole world turned upside down as she begins to unravel beneath the stigma of mental health.Her newest patient is a young girl who witnessed the suicide of her college professor, and when their first session takes a bizarre, traumatic turn, it looks as though Cotter is now seeing the very hallucinations that her patient reported – a sinister smiling face that appears throughout their daily lives and haunts them with unsettling visions.

If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been done many, many times before. It’s easy to draw comparisons to It Follows , as well as The Ring and The Grudge . But where these movies seem to have inspired Smile, director Parker Finn uses our knowledge of their well-worn tropes to make something a little different.That’s not to say that Smile is a wholly original film – it isn’t. But it does veer off in an interesting new direction.

Finn establishes his creepy, off-kilter view of the world almost instantly with twisting camerawork that sets a disorienting tone. Sure, it’s not the most subtle of metaphors – at times, Cotter’s world is turned literally upside down with almost stomach-churning inverted landscape shots. But this neat trick that’s seemingly borrowed from the likes of Hereditary instantly puts us on edge and makes us much more empathetic to Cotter’s unraveling mental state as a result.

What’s the best modern supernatural horror movie?

Equally, the jump scares start off as a simple means of keeping us on our toes, but slowly build toward something greater. They soon come thick and fast, with plenty of feigns and fake-outs to throw us off. And that’s when you begin to realize that the almost laughable frequency of these moments is doing something else entirely. It’s setting the unnerving stage with a creeping paranoia that keeps us wondering just what’s around every corner.

The scares themselves are quite tame by comparison, but that doesn’t matter.The whole point is to keep us tense throughout the entire film as you second-guess where the next jump scare is coming from… and the really fun part is that you’ll rarely get it right.

These interesting little touches make Smile much more than a cheap scare. Instead, it revels in its ability to make you squirm. The very bloody and visceral nature of the deaths is offset by the weird, ethereal emptiness of its victims’ faces. Finn absolutely nails the creeping dread of a mental health professional who knows she won’t be taken seriously and explores the stigma of depression and anxiety as Cotter fights an uphill battle with those around her.

Sosie Bacon is an absolute thrill to watch as the ever-deteriorating Dr. Cotter, with an incredible performance that gets to the heart of mental health anxiety while grounding the sheer hysterics of being pursued by a supernatural entity. Jessie T. Usher, meanwhile, is all-too-believable as Trevor, Rose’s new boyfriend who thinks she’s going crazy. A brief appearance from Rob Morgan is brilliantly paced as he transforms from rational to utterly terrified in the blink of an eye.

Best Horror Movies So Far In 2022

On the surface, Smile’s premise is a simple one, but there’s a lot more weight to it than initially meets the eye. Sure, it only scratches the surface when it comes to exploring complex issues of mental health stigma. But Bacon wears the weariness of a well-meaning therapist in those early scenes… and as her own sanity begins to unravel, we experience the true horror of a woman who knows what all this means. An unnerving soundtrack from Cristobal Tapia de Veer helps keep us on the edge of our seats with unexpected turns that heighten our anxiety to almost unbearable levels.

Smile may borrow heavily from other horror films, but it certainly brings something unique to the table, and I’m not just talking about that creepy smile. Finn knows the expected horror tropes and uses them against us, building a crippling unease that heightens what would be fairly unambitious jump scares with skin-crawling efficiency. His interesting use of light and sound ratchets up tension throughout, while jump scares combined with smash cuts will leave you wondering what exactly just happened… in a good way. Throw in an impeccable central performance from Bacon and Smile gives us the creepy, horrifying tale of a woman coming undone in the face of supernatural horror.

And remember – Smile. What’s the use of crying?

Smile is a disorienting, anxiety-inducing nightmare that leaves you questioning everything you see. The scares feel over-abundant at first, with feints and fake-outs almost laughably frequent, but they eventually create a creeping paranoia that nothing is quite as it seems. The scares are utterly terrifying at times, and Sosie Bacon plays the troubled Dr. Cotter with a deft hand, exploring difficult subjects of mental health stigma while fighting back the hysterics. Right from the start, Smile gets under your skin. It may borrow from plenty of other horror tales, but director Parker Finn still manages to do a few fresh things with these well-worn tropes.

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Smile director Parker Finn unpacks the movie’s many endings

‘Horror audiences have gotten so savvy, so I tried to put myself in their shoes’

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Sosie Bacon as Rose in Smile biting her finger as she contemplates her haunting

In some ways, Parker Finn’s feature debut Smile is a standard horror movie, where a central character (hospital therapist Rose, played by Sosie Bacon) falls prey to a supernatural phenomenon and spends most of the movie dealing with the increasingly terrifying battle to understand, resist, and survive what’s happening to her.

But Smile takes an unusual tack at the end, with Finn’s script going in directions designed to shake off horror fans who think they can see the twists coming. After the movie’s world premiere at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, Polygon sat down with Finn and asked him to walk through the movie’s ending: What went into it on a practical level, how to interpret what we see on screen, and why he left out one detail that seems particularly significant.

[ Ed. note: Ending spoilers ahead for Smile .]

How does the movie Smile end?

Rose first learns about the smiling monster that takes over her life when a distraught young woman named Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) is brought to Rose’s hospital in a state of near-hysteria. Laura explains that she’s been seeing an “entity” no one else can see, a creature with a horrible smile that sometimes appears to her in the guise of other people she knows, alive or dead. Then Laura collapses screaming, clearly something over her shoulder that Rose can’t see. As Rose calls for help, Laura stands up calmly smiling, and slits her own throat.

From that moment on, Rose keeps seeing Laura, in public and private, smiling at her. She has visions and nightmares that feature other people she knows, smiling and screaming at her. Rose tells other people about the entity, including her fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), but they believe she’s having delusions brought on by the stress and trauma of Laura’s death. Eventually, Rose and her ex, a policeman named Joel (Kyle Gallner) discover a chain of similarly grotesque suicides stretching back into the past. The pattern suggests that the entity haunts someone until they’re deeply traumatized, then forces them to kill themselves in front of a witness, who is traumatized by the death. Then the entity starts over with its new victim.

A redheaded bearded man in a sweater sits on a hospital bed in front of pink curtains with the biggest smile ever

Rose and Joel find one person who broke the chain and survived, by grotesquely murdering someone else in front of a witness and passing the entity on to that witness. That sets up a few likely possibilities for the end: Rose can either sacrifice someone else to survive, like Naomi Watts’ character Rachel does with a similar passed-on curse in The Ring ; she can fail to break the curse and the entity can win, meaning Rose dies in front of someone else who takes on the trauma; or she can find another way to confront and fight the creature.

In the end, Smile has all three of those endings. Rose brutally stabs a terrified patient to death at her hospital in front of her screaming boss, Morgan (Kal Penn). But that turns out to be a dream she’s having while passed out in her car in front of the hospital, and she flees the hospital and Morgan in horror.

Then she drives to her abandoned, disintegrating childhood home, where her addict mother died of an overdose — which Rose potentially could have prevented if she’d called an ambulance as her mother begged her to do, instead of fleeing in fear. The original repressed trauma and guilt over her mother’s death is what drew the smiling entity to her in the first place. Rose faces the creature first in the form of her mother, then in the form of a giant, spindly creature. But she forgives herself for failing to help her mother when she was 10 years old, and sets the creature and the house on fire, symbolizing her willingness to finally let go of the past.

But when she returns to Joel to apologize for pushing him away when they were dating, and admit that he scared her because he was getting past her psychological barriers, he reveals himself as the entity again. Rose realizes she’s still at her childhood home, and never actually fought the entity or left — the entire confrontation she experienced was another one of the creature’s hallucinations. Joel arrives, and Rose runs from him, recognizing that the creature means for him to witness her forced suicide and become its next victim.

Inside the house, the tall, spindly creature rips its face off, revealing something raw and glistening with a series of toothy grins all down its face. Then it forces Rose’s mouth open and crawls inside her. When Joel breaks into the house, he just sees Rose, dumping kerosene on herself and turning to smile at him. She sets herself on fire and dies, completing the chain and setting Joel up as the creature’s next prey.

What does the end of Smile mean?

Smile suggests there are many ways of dealing with trauma, by passing it on ( as abuse victims often do by abusing others ), coming to terms with it, or collapsing under its weight. But Finn says the intention with the nested series of fake-out endings was to get ahead of an audience that might have been trying to get ahead of the movie.

“Horror audiences have gotten so savvy, so I tried to put myself in their shoes,” he says. “What would I be expecting? What would I be anticipating? And I tried to subvert that and do something that might catch them off-guard, and kind of flip them on their heads.”

Sosie Bacon as Rose running from a burning building at night in Smile

At the same time, the “It was all a dream” ending is a notorious fake-out in movies, so Finn had to make sure he justified that route early on, by making it clear that the creature could provoke elaborate hallucinations in its victims — and that it specifically used those visions to manipulate their behavior and heighten their fear.

“The movie all along teaches you how to watch it, and teaching that you can’t trust Rose’s perception,” Finn says. “It’s in the DNA of the movie to mess with the viewer a little. So I wanted to really pay that off with how the movie ends, how what might feel like an ending might not be an ending. I leaned into that. From early on, I knew I was always interested in following the story to its worst logical conclusion. But I also wanted to have an emotional catharsis. So I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. Hopefully [the ending] delivers on that.”

Finn says he’s looking forward to viewers picking the movie apart, asking questions about what’s real and what isn’t. “But I also really love the idea that if something is happening in your mind, it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not,” he says. “For that person, the experience is real.”

What happened to Rose’s father?

The film’s opening sequence pans across a series of portraits of Rose’s family, with her mother, father, and her sister Holly all happy together. Then Rose’s father disappears from the pictures. It’s unclear whether he died or abandoned the family. Viewers could theorize that whatever happened to him set off Rose’s mother’s decay and led her to spiral into depression and addiction — but it could just as well be possible that he fled because he couldn’t deal with what was happening to her and how her mental health was breaking down. Finn says it was important to him to leave it as an open question.

“I wanted Smile to pretty much be a mother-daughter story. There’s so much in the idea of [Rose’s] isolation, of it being just her and her mom, alone. I like that there’s the tiniest hint that there was a father, clearly, at some point, but it’s deliberately ambiguous.”

Finn says that too much detail about what happened to Rose’s father might have shaped viewers’ expectations or responses in ways that he didn’t want to bring into the story. “I didn’t want it to have undue influence,” he says. “Just the absence, that was the important thing to me — that the absence spoke volumes and really amplified the mother-daughter relationship.”

Connections between Smile and a short that inspired it

Finn previously made a short movie set in the same world, Laura Hasn’t Slept , which was meant to debut at SXSW in 2020. The festival that year was one of the first events to be shut down due to the spread of COVID-19, but Finn was still able to make a deal with Paramount to make Smile based on the strength of that short.

Unlike some short films that evolve into features, Laura Hasn’t Slept doesn’t tell the same story as Smile . “I like to think of them as like spiritual siblings,” Finn says. “Pieces of DNA from the short film are threaded through the feature, and little Easter eggs here and there. And then Caitlin Stasey, who plays Laura Weaver in Smile , is the titular Laura in Laura Hasn’t Slept as well.

A woman smiles with devilish glee in Smile

“While the two roles, there’s a parallel running through them, they go in quite different directions. So I think it’s very fun. I’d be curious for people who have seen the feature first to go back and watch the short. They might see how the feature could almost be a sequel to the short.”

Audiences currently can’t see Laura Hasn’t Slept — it isn’t available for streaming or purchase at all — but Finn expects that to change soon.

“Paramount’s got it,” he says. “It will be coming back into the world soon. I think they’re gonna try to make sure that it’s out there and accessible in a lot of different ways.”

Will there be a Smile 2?

Finn doesn’t immediately have an idea for a sequel, at least not one he wants to admit to. “I wanted the movie to really exist for its own sake,” he says. “I wanted to tell this character’s story. That was what was really important to me. I think there’s a lot of fun to be had in the world of Smile . But certainly as a filmmaker, I never want to retread anything I’ve already done. So if there was ever to be more of Smile , I’d want to make sure it was something unexpected, and different than what Smile is.”

Instead, he’s currently developing other horror projects. “I’m working on a few different things, but nothing I’m talking about yet,” he says. “But genre and horror is always my first love. And I want to make genre films that are character-driven, that are doing some sort of exploration of the human condition, and the scary things about being a human being. That’s the stuff I really love. And if I can take that and twist it up with some sort of extraordinary genre element, that’s the lane I want to live in.”

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Smile Review: A Delightfully Unsettling Horror Film

By Jonathan Sim

Say cheese. A new horror film has arrived in theaters and has featured a marketing campaign like no other. Brief teaser trailers showcasing creepy smiles, actors smirking maniacally a the camera at Major League Baseball games, and the fact that this movie shifted from a streaming release to a theatrical one following positive test screenings has the world waiting for Smile . This film follows psychiatrist Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), who gets haunted by an entity with an evil smile after witnessing a traumatic incident with one of her patients.

Smile is a unique, well-directed horror movie. It is another fine addition to September’s phenomenal run of original films and a great one for closing out the month. This movie comes out the same month as films like Barbarian and Pearl , and it may be even better than those. When the trailer came out, it was genuinely challenging to decide whether this would be an excellent horror film or an absolute trainwreck. Fortunately, it was the former, as Smile will blow you out of the water with how well-written, intense, and genuinely scary it can be. Who knew what horrors would be found within this frightening feature?

I went into Smile expecting to hate it. I wasn’t fully onboard for the first few minutes. At first, it felt as if the opening scene was not chilling enough, another character would have been a worthy protagonist, and the movie could have been another Truth or Dare — another film that uses evil smiles as its antagonist. However, the movie quickly picks up the pace and gets you onboard with its horrifying, gory imagery that avoids being gratuitous while perfectly depicting the scary nature of the film. While this premise could have easily slipped into comical territory, it works surprisingly well.

Smile is written and directed by Parker Finn in his feature directorial debut. This is a superb debut from a strong horror filmmaker. His camera movements and use of darkness are stylish and phenomenal. One of the key talking points this movie may start among audiences is the amount of jump scares it features. While it offers many jump scares, they are not cheap, false, or ineffective. Some horror movies feature characters grabbing the protagonist’s shoulder accompanied by a piercing noise; this is not that movie. The jump scares can sometimes catch you off guard, which is the highest compliment that I can give to a film that uses this cinematic technique.

There are times in Smile where you feel the dread and terror the protagonist goes through. Sometimes, you may even find yourself covering your eyes, afraid to look at what might be peeking through the shadows. The scariest thing about the antagonist is that it is not a monster with a weakness. The antagonist is invisible and unstoppable, taking you down a cursed path similar to what we saw in films like The Ring and It Follows . The movie does a phenomenal job setting up a ticking clock, high stakes, and a lot of fear, as you never know what happens next.

What makes this even better is how the antagonist does not only scare Rose. Instead, the antagonist takes advantage of Rose’s trauma and uses it against her while ruining her life. The best horror movies, such as Candyman , Orphan , and The Invisible Man , have antagonists that isolate the hero and make their lives a living hell. This movie does an excellent job of that while exploring themes of trauma and letting go of it. The only issue with the film is a final act that nearly undercuts what made the movie scary in the first place, but ultimately lands back on two feet. Smile is an intense horror film dealing with survivor’s guilt that exceeds all expectations. By the film’s end, I found my palms sweating — something I’d never experienced.

SCORE : 8/10

As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 8 equates to “Great.” While there are a few minor issues, this score means that the art succeeds at its goal and leaves a memorable impact.

Disclosure: The critic attended a press screening for ComingSoon’s Smile review.

Jonathan Sim is a film critic and filmmaker born and raised in New York City. He has met/interviewed some of the leading figures in Hollywood, including Christopher Nolan, Zendaya, Liam Neeson, and Denis Villeneueve. He also works as a screenwriter, director, and producer on independent short films.

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DVD & Streaming
Drama , Horror , Mystery/Suspense

Content Caution

In Theaters

September 30, 2022
Sosie Bacon as Rose Cotter; Jessie T. Usher as Trevor; Kyle Gallner as Joel; Caitlin Stasey as Laura Weaver; Robin Weigert as Dr. Madeline Northcott; Kal Penn as Dr. Morgan Desai; Judy Reyes as Victoria Muñoz; Kevin Keppy as Nightmare Mom; Rob Morgan as Robert Talley; Gillian Zinser as Holly; Nick Arapoglou as Greg; Matthew Lamb as Jackson

Home Release Date

November 15, 2022
Parker Finn

Distributor

Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

Sometimes, despite how tough things are, all you can do is just put on a smile and go about your day.

That’s especially true for Dr. Rose Cotter, who works with the most insane patients in the Emergency Psychiatric Unit. It’s a tough job, sometimes, dealing with all the trauma and mental illness in there.

But nothing compares to the day when Rose met a patient named Laura.

Laura was concerned about something supernatural tormenting her—something that only she could see. And each time it appeared to her, the supposed demon she described would have a threatening, crazy smile on its face. A moment later, Laura panicked, saying the demon was in the room with them—before cutting her own throat with a disturbing smile of her own across her face.

Since then, Rose has been experiencing some issues of her own—like visions of the dead patient and general feelings of unease. Based on her 80-hour work week and the recent trauma, she suspects it’s probably PTSD.

But as time goes on, Rose isn’t so sure that her condition is medical in nature. Because ever since Laura’s suicide, she’s been having hallucinations.

They’re all of people, and they’re all smiling threateningly at her .

And each time it happens, they get a little more aggressive.

Positive Elements

I’ll be honest: There’s very little in this film that’s positive. The majority of it is a downward narrative spiral that suggests the damage of mental illness is inevitable and unescapable.

If I were to insert a bit of theme-sifting psychoanalysis, it seems the purpose of the demonic smiling throughout the film is a message about ignoring or “smiling through” the trauma each victim has experienced rather than dealing with it outright. That’s not a particularly good message.

On a more granular level, however, there were some other small nuggets of positivity. When Rose’s sister and brother-in-law demean hospital work, Rose’s fiancé, Trevor, defends her. He explains that Rose does it because she loves the work.

Despite no one else wanting to help or believe her, Rose’s ex, Joel, agrees to assist her, even after her poor treatment of him. At one point, Rose confronts past trauma from her childhood, and she realizes she shouldn’t continue to bear the guilt for it.

Spiritual Elements

The crux of the film revolves around a demonic entity that torments its victims before causing them to commit suicide in front of another person. The demon then attaches itself to that witness via the trauma they experienced through witnessing the violent suicide. Various instances of hauntings and hallucinations occur as a result of the demon’s attacks.

This story deals with the idea that demonic influences are real, but it doesn’t do so from a particularly Christian point of view. That said, Scripture clearly teaches us that the demonic realm and its potential influence upon humans is real, and that an ongoing spiritual battle rages around us. (See Ephesians 6:10-20.) Thankfully, the book of Revelation also teaches us how that battle ultimately ends. And the New Testament as a whole invites us into a relationship with Jesus as the pathway to eternal life and spiritual victory over any dark, demonic forces.

Sexual Content

Rose is briefly seen in her bra and later in the shower, though nothing is shown. Rose occasionally kisses her fiancé, and she lives with him. A woman is seen in a shirt and underwear.

Violent Content

The film’s imagery includes a lot of gruesome, gory, bloody deaths and dead people: a patient cuts her cheek and throat with a shard of vase, and we’re forced to sit through the whole, slow ordeal. We watch a man cut his throat with garden shears (though he faces the other way, we still see a large spray of blood). A man is said to have bludgeoned himself to death by hitting his own face with a hammer, and we see a picture of the grisly result. Other victims of suicide are shown after the fact, too: someone killed by a gunshot wound, another run over by a train and a couple people are lit on fire, and we see the skin melting off one of them. Another woman is shown to have committed suicide via an overdose on pills.

We see a couple characters pull the skin off of their faces, revealing muscle underneath. A person gets stabbed over and over onscreen. Someone’s wrist is snapped, uncovering bone. Rose falls onto a glass coffee table, and we see her bloodied arms covered in shards of glass as a result. A child is given a dead cat as a present. Rose accidentally cuts her thumb.

[ Spoiler Warning ] At one point, the demon reveals itself, and it pulls open a person’s mouth to a horrific size (as if the person’s jaw was made of putty) in order to crawl inside. In a creepy jump scare, a woman approaches Rose’s car. When she reaches the door, her head hangs upside down as if her neck alone suddenly turned into rubber. We also learn that you can escape the curse if you gruesomely murder someone else and another person witnesses the event (passing the curse onto that witness), and we meet one person who chose that dismal path.

Some of the violence we witness is directly connected to the movie’s dozen or so jump scares.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used about 50 times, and the s-word is used 10 times. “D–n” and “h—” are also heard. God’s name is misused 12 times, once paired with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused four times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

We hear a reference to drug abuse. Rose drinks a few glasses of wine throughout the film. Rose tries to get a prescription medication. Someone’s room is cluttered by wine, cigarettes and prescription pills.

Other Negative Elements

An insane man repeats that nothing matters, and everyone dies. Another patient is said to have swallowed her own hair. A couple wonders why anyone would become a doctor if they weren’t doing it to become rich. A woman heavily drools out of her mouth.

Typically, a smile tells us good things. Sometimes, it means we’re welcome in someone’s presence. Other times, it might mean we’re liked, attractive or funny. But in Smile , it may just mean that you’re the next trauma-filled meal for a malevolent entity.

Smile acts like a mix of The Ring and It Follows . The demon in this flick jumps to its next victim by having its previous victim commit suicide in front of them. And because the entity feasts upon trauma, it haunts its victims for around a week to really get them to stew in their suffering—like marinating meat in a slow cooker.

This marinade, however, isn’t your standard garlic ginger or honey sriracha. No, it’s pure torment and agony. The demon frequently jump scares its victims and gives them horrific hallucinations before causing them to commit suicide in the most gruesome of fashions—few of which are hidden from the view of the moviegoer. This treatment causes our protagonist to utter not a few swears along the way herself.

As a horror movie, Smile knows how to scare. But its underlying narrative unleashes a nasty, nihilistic message upon viewers, too. Namely, that the destructive effects of trauma are inevitable and unavoidable, that hope and deliverance are but a mirage.

And that’s not something to smile about.

Kennedy Unthank

Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”

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After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, a psychiatrist becomes increasingly convinced she is being threatened by an uncanny entity. After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, a psychiatrist becomes increasingly convinced she is being threatened by an uncanny entity. After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, a psychiatrist becomes increasingly convinced she is being threatened by an uncanny entity.

Parker Finn
Sosie Bacon
Jessie T. Usher
Kyle Gallner
1.2K User reviews
253 Critic reviews
68 Metascore
2 wins & 22 nominations

Top cast 42

Rose Cotter

Dr. Madeline Northcott

Laura Weaver

Dr. Morgan Desai

Robert Talley

Victoria Munoz

Carl Renken

Detective Buckley

10 Year Old Rose

Orderly Dan

Nurse Wanda
(as Ura Yoana Sanchez)
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia A couple of days before the September 30, 2022 release, actors from the film showed up at various baseball games, sitting behind home plate dead still and smiling while staring into the camera, unmoving despite fans in the audience being understandably concerned, while wearing Smile shirts. Another soon appeared in the background with the crowd during the Today show.
Goofs At approximately 31 min in, Rose breaks a glass when her alarm goes off. When the glass is shown at her feet she is wearing socks. A few seconds later as she is checking the door she is wearing lace-up shoes. Based on what happens later at a party later, there are several continuity issues that may not be "mistakes" but may actually be deliberate in order to show "breaks" in Rose's consciousness/sanity.

Rose Cotter : This isn't real! You're not real!

The Monstrosity : Your mind makes it real!

Crazy credits The Paramount opening and closing logos have a curved line in the form of a smile at the base of the mountain
Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Smile (2022)
Soundtracks Lollipop Written by Beverley Ross & Julius Dixon Performed by The Chordettes

User reviews 1.2K

fatmaalsultani
Nov 6, 2022
How long is Smile? Powered by Alexa
September 30, 2022 (United States)
United States
Official Amazon
Official site
North Arlington, New Jersey, USA (Arlington Diner exterior)
Paramount Players
Temple Hill Entertainment
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$17,000,000 (estimated)
$105,935,048
$22,609,925
Oct 2, 2022
$217,408,513

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 55 minutes

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Smile review: A cruelly scary studio horror movie

The alarm has been tripped. The backdoor is wide open. And who or whatever’s impersonating the security-system operator on the other end of the phone line has just croaked three words that no horror movie character would ever want to hear: “Look behind you.” The command puts Rose (Sosie Bacon), the increasingly petrified heroine of Smile , between a rock and a hard place. She has to look, even if every fiber of her being would rather not. And so does the audience. We’re locked into her campfire crucible, forced to follow the hesitant backward tilt of her gaze, and the anticipatory creep of a camera that’s slow to reveal what that disembodied voice has invited her (and us) to discover.

Smile is full of moments like this. It’s a nasty, diabolically calibrated multiplex scream machine — the kind of movie that sends ripples of nervous laughter through packed theaters, the kind that marionettes the whole crowd into a synchronized dance routine of frazzled nerves and spilled popcorn. Turn up your nose, if you must, at the lowly cheap sting of a jump scare. Smile gives that maligned device a workout for the ages. It rattles with aplomb.

The first big shock arrives before the delayed opening credits, at the emergency psychiatric ward where Rose works as a therapist. A patient, quaking with fear, screams of being haunted by a malevolent force. And then the distraught woman seizures into a blankly beaming trance state, as if dosed with Joker toxin, and methodically cuts a gushing wound across her throat to match her ear-to-ear smile. It’s a horrible thing to witness, and Rose isn’t just shaken by the incident. She’s cursed by it, too, as her own life is slowly invaded by a ghoulishly grinning psychological phantom — an unholy aftershock of tragedy that only she can see, and which can take the form of people she knows and loves.

Genre buffs will now note that the premise echoes one of the great horror movies of the new millennium, David Robert Mitchell’s dreamily sinister suburban creepshow It Follows . (Here, again, are figures planted in the ominous distance, and stretches of unoccupied background space you begin to fear will soon be occupied.) That’s not the only corpse Smile scavenges. The film also picks from the bones of The Ring , the Elm Street movies, and Drag Me to Hell , and even disposable Blumhouse junk like Truth or Dare . Yet from these leftovers, it cobbles together a satisfying meal; scares that are this fiendishly effective are scarcely diminished by knowing what inspired them.

Expanding his acclaimed 11-minute short, Laura Hasn’t Slept , into a full first feature, writer-director Parker Finn establishes a prodigious talent for riding our nervous systems like a rollercoaster. He’s internalized and nearly mastered a lot of tricks of the trade: foreboding establishing shots that peer from a severe overhead vantage or turn the world on its seasick head; transitional cuts so hard and sharp they approximate someone lurching out of a nightmare. Smile has little mercy. It jolts with electrical precision. At the same time, Finn varies the tactics, knowing when to take less crude routes under our skin. There’s a birthday party scene that distorts the cheerful serenading into a spooky reverberating incantation, before unwrapping a very sadistic surprise. And the great character actor Rob Morgan drops by for a terrific one-scene cameo that proves how much simulated terror can goose the real kind; his raw emotion is insidiously infectious.

Plotwise, the whole thing’s rather stock. It has its clunky, obligatory elements, including a lopsided love triangle that just fills up space between superlative bursts of funhouse mayhem. And the story eventually shades into one of those amateur expository investigations horror heroines so often embark upon, as Rose traces back a string of suicides, uncovering what the audience will figure out a few reels earlier. Will it surprise anyone to learn that the real monster of this 2022 monster movie is trauma itself? In Smile , that cobwebbed conclusion moves from subtext to explicit text: The threat, rather literally, is PTSD as a transmissive hex, while the climax hinges very bluntly on confronting demons of a personal, childhood variety. Yet Finn hasn’t put the cart before the horse, as some highfalutin horror films from the past decade have. He’s made a mainstream fright flick too genuinely, unpretentiously scary to be confused for a therapeutic exercise.

Maybe too darkly funny, too. There’s a touch of midnight-black humor to a mental health professional stubbornly rationalizing her supernatural misfortune. Rose has, after all, been on the other side of such paranoia. What would she tell a patient seeing visions after a traumatic experience? Bacon, daughter of Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, finds the drama and the comedy of this ordeal. Her Rose has an amusing habit of managing her mounting distress, tagging a sheepish “Sorry” onto the end of each freak-out.

Smile ends up drawing some grim conclusions. It’s “actually about trauma” in a rather unsparing way, with little interest in regurgitating comfortingly cathartic platitudes. One might even identify, in its apocalyptic haunted-house climax, a cruel rebuttal to the Babadook Recovery Plan. But if this studio shocker ultimately proves a bitter pill to swallow, it’s been sugarcoated in almost joyously energetic craft, the plain delight Finn takes in dousing us all in gallons of premium goosebump fuel. Horror fans, at least, will walk out with an exaggerated rictus of their own.

Smile opens in theaters everywhere Friday, September 30 . For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please visit his Authory page .

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Since its release nearly a decade ago, the film has become one of the most beloved foreign films ever to come to America, and it's easy to see why. Here are three reasons you should be sure to check it out on Prime Video before it leaves at the end of March: It's a horror movie and an action movie Train to Busan Official Trailer 1 (2016) - Yoo Gong Movie

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Common sense media reviewers.

Lots of gore and noisy jump scares in disappointing chiller.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

No messages here: This is just about a "curse" tha

The main character is a psychiatrist who loves hel

Movie focuses on a woman, although she's largely a

Extreme blood and gore. Character slices own face,

Women in bra and/or panties. Woman taking shower,

Strong language, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "god

Main character tries to get a prescription for a m

Positive Messages

No messages here: This is just about a "curse" that randomly happens to a person. The movie tries to explain that the curse feeds on trauma, but it doesn't do anything interesting or useful with this information (i.e., What is trauma? What kinds of trauma are "deserving" of the curse? Doesn't everyone have trauma of some kind?).

Positive Role Models

The main character is a psychiatrist who loves helping others but hasn't dealt with her own issues. She descends into an unstable state and acts erratically as she struggles with hallucinations and nightmares.

Diverse Representations

Movie focuses on a woman, although she's largely a victim. An interracial relationship falls apart in a way that paints a Black character as unsympathetic. Black supporting characters include a nurse, a prison guard, and a man incarcerated for murder; none have much agency.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Extreme blood and gore. Character slices own face, with blood gurgling out. Oozing blood puddle. Blood stains. Blood spurts. Dead cat wrapped inside child's birthday present. Multiple stabbings. Character rips own face off more than once. Several jump scares. Extremely gory crime scene photos. Gory surveillance footage (person spears own head with gardening shears). Character falls, crashing through a glass coffee table and slicing up wrists (lots of blood). Person's neck bends in an unnatural way. Character bites off own thumbnail, bleeding wound. Scary monster. Monster on fire. Burning cabin. Unsettling imagery. Creepy drawings. Screaming, panic. Nightmares, hallucinations. Suicide is discussed. Dialogue describing violent events. Arguing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Women in bra and/or panties. Woman taking shower, her back to the camera.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "goddamn," "shut up," "head case," "nutcase." "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation. A character is labeled as and called "crazy."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Main character tries to get a prescription for a medicine used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc. Character gulps glasses of wine to ease stress. Wine at dinner.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Smile is a horror movie about a psychiatrist (Sosie Bacon) who falls under a mysterious curse; unless she can find a way to break it, she's destined to die by suicide while passing on the curse to someone else. It has chilling moments but is mostly a collection of borrowed ideas and loud jump scares. Expect extreme amounts of gore and violence, with face-slicing, face-ripping, gurgling blood, blood stains, blood spurts, a dead cat wrapped inside a child's birthday present, stabbings, gory crime scene photos, someone crashing through a glass coffee table, a scary monster, a neck bending in an unnatural way, fire, screaming, panic, nightmares, and more. Language is also strong, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "goddamn," etc. A woman showers with her back to viewers, and women are shown in bras and panties. There's social drinking, and a character gulps wine after a stressful day and asks for a prescription for a medicine used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Kids say (81)

Based on 27 parent reviews

MENTAL HEALTH CONCERNS!

Very scary horror, what's the story.

In SMILE, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a psychiatrist, has been working a long shift and is just about to go home when she agrees to see a distraught patient, Laura Weaver ( Caitlin Stasey ). Laura claims that she's being followed by some malevolent force that appears to her in different bodies, all of them smiling sinister smiles. While talking, she suddenly screams and then goes quiet. A smile appears on her face, and she slices her own throat. Not long after, Rose starts seeing things herself. She enlists the help of her ex, Joel ( Kyle Gallner ), the police detective assigned to Laura's case, to learn more. They discover that there's a pattern, going back 20 victims, each a witness to a previous suicide. Then Rose gets the idea that, as long as she's alone, no one can witness her death by suicide, so the curse won't get passed on. She heads up to a remote cabin in the woods for a showdown with the thing that's responsible.

Is It Any Good?

The image of a creepy, sinister smile is so primal and so chilling that it might have inspired something truly penetrating, but, sadly, this horror movie is content to fall back on noisy jump scares. The feature writing and directing debut of Parker Finn, Smile isn't without its spine tingles, but they're few and fleeting as the movie treads through a collection of well-worn clichés. The idea of a curse passed from one person to another has been better used in Final Destination , The Ring , It Follows , and more; when that idea succeeds, it's because the evil force remains a mystery. Here, it's explained and detailed down to the last bit, revealing the monster as a stringy-haired thing (just like in The Ring ) that's up to no good. Cheap, cacophonous jump scares accompany its every move.

The typical, frantic race against time to find a way to break the curse is here, too, but the long overnight drive to a prison to speak to the one man who managed to survive is a complete waste of time; nothing is learned that viewers didn't already know. (The movie's bulky 115 minutes could have used some trimming.) It even uses the old upside-down-drone-shot driving footage that was featured in Midsommar and other movies. Most of the heavy lifting in Smile is handed to Bacon, whose descent into madness -- everyone she encounters calls her "crazy" -- is ultimately more wearying than touching. Even the smile itself, used so effectively in the movie's opening sequence, is wasted throughout the rest of it. Smile leaves off with the potential for a sequel, but this entry is already pretty sparse, like a mouth without teeth.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Smile 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of horror movies ? Why do people sometimes enjoy being scared?

It's said that the monster in the movie feeds on trauma. What is trauma? Are there different degrees of trauma? Does everyone experience it at some point?

How can a smile be so scary when its typically intended to convey joy and happiness?

Movie Details

In theaters : September 30, 2022
On DVD or streaming : December 13, 2022
Cast : Sosie Bacon , Kyle Gallner , Caitlin Stasey
Director : Parker Finn
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Gay actors
Studio : Paramount
Genre : Horror
Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
Run time : 115 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong violent content and grisly images, and language
Last updated : April 20, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Review: Is horror movie ‘Smile’ so dumb that it’s actually smart? Who knows!

A young woman at night, illuminated by the lantern she holds.

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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. 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.

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 Tapia de Veer, and a believably twitchy lead performance from Sosie Bacon . Oh, and jump scares, a whole lotta jump scares.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

Back in 1942, horror producer Val Lewton 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. It’s a technique that Finn liberally abuses in “Smile,” almost to comedic effect.

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 Jamie Lee Curtis has given in the past few years about the “Halloween” franchise). The main character in “Smile,” Rose Cotter (Bacon), is a therapist who catches the curse from a young woman (Caitlin Stasey) in the throes of a debilitating mental health crisis after witnessing a suicide. 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.

Finn continually walks a line in “Smile” making us wonder if the movie is just dumb, or so dumb it’s looped back around to smart again. Finn casts Robin Weigert , 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. 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? That’s the biggest question in sussing out its quality.

Ultimately, that we never really know the answer to that question, and that the ending settles for a sequel possibility that betrays the film’s own interior logic, indicates that no, “Smile” isn’t entirely in on the joke, or at least willing to show that it is. 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.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes Rated: R, for strong violent content and grisly images, and language Playing: In theaters Sept. 30

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‘Smile’ Review – A Scary Grin Exposes a Familiar But Effective Horror Movie

Bloody Disgusting’s Smile review is spoiler-free.

Reality begins to blur, then quickly unravels at the seams for the unlucky in Smile . One ghastly grin followed by a traumatic event causes those who witness it to succumb to its influence slowly. Smile takes the concept of the cursed object to a new level with a mental health-focused threat that bides its time, tormenting its victims through isolation and past traumas. While it wears its influences proudly and follows a familiar path, Smile offers compelling, affable leads and a few scary tricks up its sleeves to appease mainstream audiences.

Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ) works 80 hours a week at her hospital’s emergency mental health ward. She’s a workaholic that uses her job as a means of avoiding, or perhaps even repressing, painful childhood memories. That changes when she attempts to speak with a brand new patient that tells of a relentless entity pursuing her, smiling as it confronts her with horrible visions. Then that patient shockingly commits suicide in front of Rose. Shortly after, Rose begins to suffer horrific visions from what she saw, and it slowly escalates. The more Rose realizes time is running short as something is closing in around her, the more others become convinced she’s unwell.

Sosie Bacon and Kyle Gallner star in Paramount Pictures Presents in Association with Paramount Players A Temple Hill Production “SMILE.”

Writer/Director Parker Finn picks up where he left off with his short film “ Laura Hasn’t Slept ” for his feature debut. The continuation passes the baton of mental health-related horror from the eponymous Laura ( Caitlin Stasey ) to Rose, who has her own history with mental health to wrangle. Framing Smile as more of a sequel rather than a longer adaptation is a smart choice to build upon the ideas introduced while centering the story on a different side of mental health.

Bacon makes for a capable lead. Her Rose is a convincing and put-together professional who comes undone in the most empathetic ways. Despite the supernatural chills, it’s a credit to Bacon that she makes us question Rose’s sanity almost as much as Rose does. Kyle Gallner also instills rooting interest in a smaller capacity as Joel, a detective invested in Rose’s case for multiple reasons, some personal. Their chemistry goes far in propelling the narrative.

Finn bides his time in doling out the scares, keeping the focus instead on Rose’s slow unraveling. That’s not to say there aren’t any; expect quite a few chilling moments that’ll induce goosebumps. But there’s a careful restraint to the scare crafting. Finn wants to make you invested in Rose’s plight, first and foremost, as her loved ones slowly turn their backs on her.

The 'Smile' Trailer Is Finally Here and Taunts, "You're Going to Die!"

But Smile might be a little too restrained in the scare department. Savvy horror fans will likely also recognize some of the scare tactics and influences, which could dampen some of the impact. It makes it easier to guess where Rose’s story might be headed. The third act picks up the pace and packs in some potent horror imagery, making for a grand finale that’ll leave you wanting more.

Overall, Parker Finn presents some interesting ideas about trauma and its insidious, parasitic nature on our psyche, using horror in effective ways to convey it. Bacon deftly maintains our attention even in the lulls between unsettling scare moments. There’s a familiarity to the curse’s nature and formula, drawing easy comparisons to several beloved horror films. Even still, it’s well crafted and introduces a fresh feeling mythology, with some genuine scares along the way. Smile makes for a solid enough crowd pleaser heading into the Halloween season.

Smile releases in theaters on September 30.

Bloody Disgusting’s Fantastic Fest coverage is presented by The Callisto Protocol. Fight to survive the horrors locked within the walls of Black Iron Prison in this immersive, next-generation take on survival horror – The Callisto Protocol . Pre-order now to be one of the first to experience this terrifying new story-driven, single-player, survival horror game. https://bit.ly/BD-TheCallistoProtocol

Horror journalist, RT Top Critic, and Critics Choice Association member. Co-Host of the Bloody Disgusting Podcast. Has appeared on PBS series' Monstrum, served on the SXSW Midnighter shorts jury, and moderated horror panels for WonderCon and SeriesFest.

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‘the buildout’ review – a stunning, mystical odyssey into the unknown.

In Southern California, there is a hotbed of paranormal activity known as the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The area called the Borrego Triangle boasts stories of UFOs, eight-foot-tall ghost skeletons, and a furry cryptid known as the Borrego Sandman. Filmmaker Zeshaan Younus and producer Trevor Dillon crowdfunded, assembled a small cast, and spent a week in the Anza-Borrego Desert filming Younus’ directorial debut, The Buildout , with real life paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk ( Hellier ) serving as Executive Producer.

Part found footage and part paranormal fever dream, The Buildout draws from the rich supernatural history of the location, as well as the majestic scenery, with captivating results.

The Buildout follows close friends Dylan ( Hannah Alline ) and Cameron ( Jenna Kanell ) as they venture out into the California desert on motorbikes. The two women have been friends since childhood and this long journey into the desert will be the last time they are together. It’s been a couple of years since Dylan decided to get sober and during that time, she also joined an enigmatic church and believes that she has found God. Cameron says she’s in a cult. As they drive, the women reminisce about their lives together and the death of Cameron’s sister Dakota ( Danielle Evon Ploeger ). It soon becomes clear that Cameron does not share Dylan’s spiritual beliefs and she also has some resentment towards her for her sister’s death.

When they stop to have lunch, Dylan secretly records a video for Cameron to remember her by because she isn’t planning to come back.

Meanwhile, in the middle of the desert, a Cleric ( Natasha Helevi ) has set up a tent and base camp and is ecstatically recording a message for the Clergy to let them know that they have been guided to the location they were meant to find. She tells the Clergy she has had visions to confirm that they are on the right path. This will be the new, permanent home for the members of the church. Inside the tent are maps of the desert and various drawings, including one of a hooded figure without a face and the word “Manifest.”

The Buildout is beautifully shot, and the seemingly endless Southern California desert feels like the perfect location for the otherworldly story to unfold. The remote setting provides a sense of desolation, which is magnified by immersive, surreal storytelling, as well as the obvious vulnerability of the two women. Alline gives an incredible performance as Dylan, a recovering addict claiming to have found rebirth and peace, when in reality she is not as confident in her beliefs as she seems. Kanell effortlessly portrays Cameron as bold and self-assured, but she is also struggling with grief due to the loss of her sister, and questioning her lifelong friendship with Dylan, as well as her own spirituality.

The Buildout is a stunning, genre-bending odyssey into the unknown that skillfully blends themes of mysticism, grief, and the paranormal into a film where reality and the supernatural blur. Gorgeous cinematography, outstanding performances, and a thought-provoking, transcendental story make The Buildout an incredibly impressive first feature film. The audience will benefit from a second viewing.

The Buildout premiered virtually at this year’s Chattanooga Film Festival.

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Smile 2 trailer reveals next victim of smile curse & original character's bloody return.

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The trailer for Smile 2 has arrived.
The horror sequel features Naomi Scott as fictional pop star Skye Riley.
The trailer features the return of Kyle Gallner's Joel as well as the eerie smiling entity.

The first trailer for Smile 2 is here. Like the original film, the sequel comes was helmed by director Parker Finn, who also penned the script. Smile followed emergency room therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) after a patient died by suicide in front of her, transferring an entity to her via trauma that then torments her with visions of eerily smiling people. The horror movie was both a critical and commercial success when it was released in 2022, and the upcoming Smile 2 was announced within the year.

Now, Paramount Pictures has released Smile 2 's first trailer. Check it out below:

It opens on a concert performed by Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a pop star who seems to take after Lady Gaga in terms of both fame and aesthetic. However, the night is ruined when her friend (Lukas Gage) smashes a weight into his own face, transferring the Smile entity to her. Eerie happenings then haunt Skye , including a smiling fan and a group of people chasing her down a hall. The trailer also showcases the return of original Smile star Kyle Gallner, reprising his role as Joel.

Smile 2 Is Outrageously Ambitious

The trailer reveals how much further the smile sequel is going.

Naomi Scott as Skye Riley Posing in a Sparkly Outfit in Smile 2

A lot has been revealed in this new trailer, but one of the standout aspects is the fact that the new movie is even more ambitious than the first . While the original Smile was aesthetically ambitious, using every tool at its disposal to unsettle the audience with sound and camerawork, the new movie is amping up the ambition behind the scenes, utilizing what must be an expanded budget. This seems to include more setpieces featuring larger pools of extras, as well as creating original songs and outfits for the fictional pop star at the center of the movie.

The original Smile cost $17 million to make and ended up becoming the highest-grossing horror movie of 2022, earning $217.4 million worldwide.

However, the story being told onscreen seems just as ambitious as the behind-the-scenes aspects. This is shown in multiple ways, including the fact that the entity haunts Skye by taking on even broader and more terrifying forms, including a crowd of people reaching out toward her, mimicking the rabid fans she has likely grown used to, but with a terrifying twist. The fact that Skye is a pop star with a huge platform also puts considerably more people at risk if she succumbs to the curse live onstage, raising the stakes of the movie considerably .

Smile 2 may also be expanding the worldbuilding of its story thanks to the return of Joel. It remains to be seen how long he survives past the original Smile ending , which implied that the curse had been passed to him. However, it seems likely that he will interact with Skye at some point, and he may be able to offer valuable insight into how he has lived long enough to support her attempts to overcome the curse.

Source: Paramount Pictures

Smile 2 is the sequel to the 2022 psychological horror film by director Parker Finn that centers on a therapist who witnesses a patient's suicide, leading to a series of terrifying supernatural events. The sequel will see the return of Finn as director, with Paramount continuing distribution.

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Southgate says he is ‘oblivious’ of Lineker’s four-letter criticism of England

England’s manager Gareth Southgate sits at the bench prior to a Group C match between Denmark and England at the Euro 2024 soccer tournament in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, June 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

England’s Harry Kane walks to the bench past England’s manager Gareth Southgate after being substituted during a Group C match between Denmark and England at the Euro 2024 soccer tournament in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, June 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

FILE - Gary Lineker, sports broadcaster and former England soccer player smiles as he takes his seat in the Royal Box on Centre Court on day six of the Wimbledon tennis championships in London, Saturday, July 8, 2023. Gary Lineker’s political opinions have upset the U.K. government in the recent past - now he has delivered a brutal, four-letter assessment of England’s national soccer team at Euro 2024. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

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COLOGNE, Germany (AP) — Gary Lineker’s stinging criticism of England created waves at the European Championship.

Gareth Southgate, however, said he was “oblivious” to the four-letter assessment delivered by one of England’s greatest players and one of Britain’s biggest television stars.

“It is not important to me at all,” he said on Monday. “If you don’t open yourself to it, it can’t affect you.”

England’s preparations for its final Group C game against Slovenia on Tuesday have been conducted against the backdrop of media and public criticism after the team’s 1-1 draw with Denmark .

“We have to reflect the mood of the nation,” Lineker, the former England captain, said on his podcast, The Rest is Football. “I can’t imagine anybody, who is English, that would have enjoyed England’s performance because it was lethargic, it was dour ...

“You can think of all sorts of words and expletives if you like,” he added, before using a four-letter word of his own.

His comments made headlines in the English media and earned rebuke from captain Harry Kane.

Southgate chose not to engage.

“The great thing about being in this job for a long time is I’ve managed to realize how to manage myself in the best way. So a few years ago I would’ve read things, I would’ve listened to things, and it would’ve saddened me and it would’ve taken energy from me. Now I have to cut myself off from it.”

Lineker is the highest-paid star on the publicly funded national broadcaster, the BBC. His political opinions have upset the U.K. government in the recent past when comparing the government’s language about migrants to that used in Nazi Germany.

Now he has turned his fire on the national soccer team, but Southgate said no criticism could be worse than his own.

“We are a high-profile team with expectations and we fully understand everything we do will be scrutinized so I am very comfortable living that life and I don’t need to engage in external because I am my own biggest critic. I think our players are as well,” he said.

“So there is nothing to be gained for us, that is going to help improve us, listening to external criticism. We know what we have done well, we are very honest about that. We know when we need to be better, we are brutally honest about that.”

Southgate was appointed England manager in 2016 and led the team to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup.

England lost the final of the last Euros to Italy on penalties, and was knocked out of the 2022 World Cup by France in the quarterfinals.

James Robson is at https://twitter.com/jamesalanrobson

AP Euro 2024: https://apnews.com/hub/euro-2024

Movie review: 'Horizon' a captivating Kevin Costner epic

Kevin Costner stars in, co-wrote and directed "Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1." Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment

LOS ANGELES, June 23 (UPI) -- Mock Kevin Costner for his propensity for three hour movies all you want, but the man knows drama, especially when he directs. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 , in theaters Friday, is an epic with no wasted moments.

In 1863, Apache attack the settlers of Horizon. Frances ( Sienna Miller ) and Lizzie Kittredge (Georgia MacPhail) are the only survivors in their family. Advertisement

The U.S. Army offers to take survivors to a town they can guard as Lt. Trent Gephart ( Sam Worthington ) does not foresee Horizon ever being habitable. Frances and Lizzie make a life with the cavalry as the film introduces other storylines.

In each of these storylines, the screenplay by Costner and Jon Baird creates scenes where characters with opposing dynamics face off suspensefully. Advertisement

Hayes Ellison (Costner) doesn't even arrive until an hour into the film, but a scene in which prostitute Marigold (Abbey Lee) tries to seduce him while he's not interested is compelling. They both have a goal and one's success means the other's failure.

Marigold's sister Ellen ( Jena Malone ) accompanies her husband Walter (Michael Angarano) to sell a plot of land. Watching huckster Walter try to sell three dangerous outlaws is suspenseful enough, but it becomes clear they have ulterior motives with Ellen anyway.

Yes, many of these scenes luxuriate. Costner takes the time to show different facets of the lives of 19th-century frontier settlers, but they're good scenes.

It's never boring and when characters intersect, it means more. Even those who don't intersect yet make a good ensemble.

Though perhaps not as action-packed as a Clint Eastwood western, the action scenes are intense and thrilling. Standoffs between big talkers and stoic quiet types lead to shootouts.

The Apache attack on the Kittredge house shows that the Kittredges are already prepared for violence. They have barricades ready to go, and they improvise when the Apache burn their roof.

Obviously, no amount of preparation can protect the Kittredge family, but they didn't settle in Apache land blindly. The film also spends time with the Apaches led by Taklishim (Tatanka Means) and Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), while doing its best not to take sides. Advertisement

The film does explore the problem of settling in indigenous territory but that's not enough to deter settlers. That also ascribes the cavalry a 2024 level of hindsight, but it makes an interesting take on familiar western tropes.

Like the preparations for Apache attacks, the cavalry also has protocols for disposing of the dead in the aftermath. Spending time on this also conveys the trauma of surviving. It's not just a plot device.

The film is still introducing new characters two hours in. Van Weyden ( Luke Wilson ) leads a caravan across the Santa Fe Trail.

It falls upon Van Weyden to educate city folks like Brits Hugh (Tom Payne) and Juliette (Ella Hunt) on pulling their weight in rough terrain. Van Weyden also has to handle unruly passengers.

Of course, Chapter 1 is unresolved, but so was The Fellowship of the Ring. It does awkwardly transition into a trailer for Chapter 2 before the end credits, but understandably they want to assure viewers there's more to come.

Such a blatant teaser probably wasn't necessary. Chapter 1 was captivating enough to want to go back for more in August when Chapter 2 opens.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment. Advertisement

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Smile Review: A Delightfully Unsettling Horror Film

SCORE : 8/10

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