#47: SMILE

 

Starring Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn and Rob Morgan. Written and directed by Parker Finn. Based on the short story Laura Hasn't Slept also by Parker Finn. Running time 115 minutes.

Written and directed by Parker Finn and based on a short story also by him, and this is his only film. Phew. 

The plot sees psychiatrist Dr. Rose Cotter, Sosie Bacon, witness a patient cut her own throat with a shard of broken vase whilst wearing a huge grin, or smile if you will. What happens next will try your patience and leave you edgy, irritable and aware once again that you've wasted another 115 minutes of your life that you're not getting back, no matter how many letters you write to your MP. 

In order to try and replicate the use of JUMP SCARES in this film, I shall be suddenly introducing bold and all-cap words, without any warning.

After the initial death of the first patience who claimed she was being stalked by something that kept smiling at her, Cotter begins to realise that the same something is hunting her. This causes the foundations of her logic and science ordered world to be rocked by the supernatural as Cotter begins to experience events THAT make all around her assume she's gone doo-lally. First her boss puts her on paid leave, then her fiancee leaves her, her sister disowns her and someone kills her cat. Luckily HER ex boyfriend, who just so happens to be a cop investigating the suicide of the patient believes her story and discovers that the patient witnessed her own college professor kill himself a week earlier and that he himself witnessed someone else kill themselves and so on and so FORTH. So it becomes clear that some sort of curse is hunting her. 

The JUMP SCARES begin in the first few minutes, as the viewer is bombarded by a lazy sludge of SHOCKS, that arrive every five minutes, indeed these are used so frequently in lieu of anything resembling actual scares, or anything unsettling that they soon become comical and elicit LAUGHTER not fear and are also annoyingly repetitive.

Cotter is an unlikeable character and there's a sense of Schadenfreude at her expense. The film wearily drags us and her to A double ending that's signposted and uses yet another trope that generates both the biggest groan of the whole film and also the film's funniest moment.

This is a clumsy, STUPID film which has at its core an interesting idea, that of a victim of the supernatural trying to turn the tables on their adversary, but it's all so CLUMSY and stymied by the jump cuts that it's just a TEDIOUS test of your patience.

Interesting aside, the film's tag line is also a warning, sadly it's a warning that you only realise once you've left the cinema, and realise your life is now shorter. 

Smile? I doubt you will, although I certainly did and for all the wrong reasons.

4/10