- Directed by Parker Finn
- Written by Parker Finn
- Stars Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Kal Penn
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 55 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcDK7lkzzsU
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Despite the upbeat title, as you might guess, this is not a happy movie. It’s downright creepy and unsettling. Nightmarish, in fact. It starts out slowly and builds nicely. The cast is excellent, and the effects are amazing.
From the publisher:
Bring Smile home on Digital! Sosie Bacon stars in the terrifying horror which critics are calling “Haunting” and “Scary as Hell”. Buy Smile on Digital now and face your fears with over an hour of heart-pounding bonus content! Including the original short film that started it all. Available at participating retailers. Rated R. From Paramount Pictures.
Synopsis
We begin with a scene of a dead woman, an apparent overdose. Nearby, we see photos of her family, and her young daughter stands outside the room, wondering what is going on– The phone rings and Rose Cotter wakes up from her dream. She’s a hospital psychiatrist. Dr. Desai runs the hospital, and he’s struggling a little to balance her desire to help patients whether they can pay and have insurance or not, and his need to satisfy the board financially.
She gets called in for another new patient, Laura, a girl who watched her professor bludgeon himself to death just last week. The woman says she’s seeing something no one else can see; she knows that sounds insane, but it’s real. It looks like people, but it’s not a real person. “It wears people’s faces like masks. It’s smiling at me. The worst smile I’ve ever seen in my life. It tells me things like, today I’m going to die!”
Laura starts smiling an exaggerated smile and then cuts her face off with a piece of broken glass. She smiles as she falls over dead. Credits roll.
Rose goes home after speaking with the police, visibly upset. She sees Laura standing in her kitchen as her fiancee Trevor comes in. She dismisses it as her imagination; she seems pretty high-strung to begin with.
The next morning, a couple police detectives are asking her about what happened. Joel, one of the detectives, is also her ex. As she goes about her rounds, some of the patients have huge and inappropriate smiles– even the guy was terminally depressed yesterday. She orders that he be restrained. Desai thinks she may have overreacted and forces her to take a week off.
She goes home and suddenly, the burglar alarm goes off. She shuts it off but then finds the back door open. The alarm company calls, and they’re more creepy than they should be: “Look behind you.” Then the phone rings for real, and it’s the real alarm people. The police come, and there’s no one there, but the cat has vanished.
Later that night, something jumps out at Rose, and she grabs a knife, which gets Trevor to freak out. She goes to see her own therapist, Dr. Northcott. The doctor thinks the ordeal with Laura triggered her own past traumas. Rose wants strong medication, but Northcott doesn’t go for it.
She goes to sister Holly’s kid’s birthday party. The boy opens the gift and finds… a dead cat. Rose swears she didn’t do it, but then she spots a smiler in the room with them and makes a scene. She falls through a glass table and ends up in the hospital herself. Desai comes in and says she needs to see someone for some help. Trevor picks her up, and they go home. Even Trevor is already doubting Rose’s sanity, especially when she starts talking about evil spirits. “I am not crazy!” she screams at him. Trevor thinks she may have inherited it from her mother, and he’s not really supportive.
Rose goes to see Mrs. Munoz, the wife of the man who killed himself with a hammer. She describes the same symptoms that Rose has been experiencing. He drew the things he saw, hundreds of pictures of crazy-looking smiling people. He also had seen someone die by suicide.
She goes to see Joel next. She wants to know about Gabriel Munoz and the person he saw kill themselves. Since he’s a cop, he can look that up. It turns out that he was staying at a hotel where a woman, Angela Powell, committed suicide. Joel runs Angela’s name through the system, and she saw a suicide too. It’s all a string of smiling suicide witnesses.
She gets home and finds that Trevor has brough Dr. Northcott over for help. Rose flips out and leaves. She goes to see Holly again and tells her that she’s cursed. She explains the whole thing, and no one would believe this story. Holly cries and says this is exactly what happened to mom; “You sound just like her.” Holly throws her out too.
Joel calls; he’s found twenty other people in the chain, nineteen of which committed suicide themselves. The only guy who survived murdered someone else, and the chain passed on to them. She explains it all to him, and he does believe it to an extent. None of the others survived more than a week.
They go to see Robert Talley, the one survivor, in jail. She talks about her situation, and he knows all about it. The only way out of the chain is by killing someone else– and there has to be a witness to continue the chain. She lies to Joel about what Talley said.
Dr. Northcott comes to the door, and Rose lets her in. Except it’s not really her; Northcott calls on the phone as they talk. The one in front of her starts to smile.
Later, Rose puts a knife up her sleeve and goes to the hospital. She finds that depression patient again, and he’s terrified of her. Dr. Desai comes in, and she stabs the patient right in front of the other doctor. They all tear their faces off. She wakes up out in the car; none of that actually happened.
She decides to leave town and stay alone and isolated, so there’s no one to pass the curse onto. She drives way out into the country to an abandoned farmhouse. It’s not just any old house; this is the house she grew up in, where her mother killed herself. She walks down the halls and looks into the bedroom. She stops at her mother’s room and looks inside.
Flashback: Young Rose goes in there, and her mother asks for help. She asks Rose to call for help on the phone, but Rose refuses and leaves. Yes, it really was her fault. Night falls, and she finds a kerosene lantern as she gets ready to spend the night there. Eventually, she hears someone in her mother’s room. Yes, it’s her mother, and she apologizes for what happened. They have a shouting match, and Rose tells all.
The demon-creature reveals itself to her, and Rose sets it on fire. Rose leaves as the house burns down. She drives back to town, feeling much better now. She goes to see Joel and apologizes for dragging him into the mess. He promises to stay with her forever as he smiles… Wait– she’s not back in town, and the old farmhouse is still there.
The real Joel has tracked her down and follows her into the house; the witness has arrived. The demon shows its true-true form, and suddenly Rose is all smiles. Joel finally breaks in, and– the chain continues…
Commentary
The smiling situation is horribly stressful, but Rose gives the impression of being a little crazed even before the trouble starts. Competent and dedicated to her work but overworked, tense, and high-strung with trauma from long ago that still troubles her. It would have been good to see Rose have a normal, good day before the trouble started. She falls apart really quickly, and it’s hard to take the ghost thing seriously with her being like that. I suppose this is some allegory for mental illness and a lack of support in general, but it’s not a very good one since there really is a supernatural force at work.
Still, it cranks up the tension as the film progresses, and you know it’s not going to end well for anyone– which it doesn’t. Actually, the further into it we got, the better it got.