Smile might be the scariest film I've ever seen.
Trigger warning: This article contains mention of suicide.
Dr Rose Cotter, played by Sosie Bacon, witnesses a patient commits suicide in front of her after she claims to see a smiling entity invisible to everyone.
After this traumatic event, Rose starts to see unexplainable things consistent with what her patient described.
Smile details her downward spiral as she seeks to find an end to the horrors following her around.
I don't watch a lot of scary films, so the bar isn't incredibly high but Smile had me thinking about it so much afterwards that I actually had a dream about it and woke up thinking "oh I need to write that down because that would be a good idea for a horror movie" before realising that I dreamt the plot of a movie I saw a couple of hours before bed.
The film is the debut feature from director Parker Finn and the debut lead performance from actor Sosie Bacon and it's a bold first showing for both.
Sosie Bacon is in almost every scene of the film slowly becoming more unhinged and desperate and her downfall is truly distressing to watch.
The film is put together in such a way that you never feel at ease. Every shot is framed just a little bit strangely, a lot of the cuts are jarring and the score is less of a score and more of a wall of disconcerting sounds.
In addition to this, there's the jump scares and there's A LOT of them. Generally, I think jump scares are lazy filmmaking but when they're used as effectively as they are in Smile it's kind of hard to fault.
Scenes will build to a scare and nothing will happen, but then midway through a simple dialogue scene, BAM! The scariest thing in the movie will happen.
The trailer made this look like another film like Truth or Dare (a ridiculous horror which is a guilty pleasure of mine), and so I went in expecting to have a kind of goofy, laugh-at-the-movie experience but then I ended up watching portions of it through the cracks in my fingers.
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