Starring Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Kal Penn and Rob Morgan

Written and directed by Parker Finn

Based on Laura Hasn’t Slept by Parker Finn

Paramount

Hyper focused therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) takes on the case of Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey), a traumatised young woman who saw her college professor kill himself. Laura kills herself in front of Rose. The next day Rose begins to hallucinate. People around her begin to smile demonically and reality begins to curdle…

Parker Finn’s feature debut is intensely confident and confidently intense. From the suspiciously light opening scene on, Finn drags his characters into hell, constantly raising the temperature and pressure until the movie ends where it began but from the opposite perspective. We get every answer we need and none of them are what we expect.

Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher and Stasey, reprising her role from the original short movie Laura Hasn’t Slept, are vital to this success. Bacon’s relentlessly compassionate, polite, increasingly frantic Rose is a heroine from a different genre and the movie spends much of its running time challenging her self image. She’s a scientist trying to fight the impossible with rationality, telling herself a story that’s true, but that she remains uncertain of. The Smile curse, and the being behind it, wield that as a cudgel and a scalpel, cutting her life away until there’s nothing left. Stasey, playing a woman at the end of the process Rose is beginning, does excellent brief work showing us all where this story ends while Gallner and Usher as her ex and current boyfriends do similar work defining the role of witnesses to this process. Usher plays upstanding straight man trying his best very well and Gallner’s crumpled, determined cop is exhausted and sweet. You like at least one of them at any given time and it never, once, matters. Because there is a monster at the start and the end of this movie and it already knows how the story is going to end.

Finn’s buttoned down direction and careful colour choice slowly unravel as the movie continues and Rose’s mental health begins to collapse. There’s an inverted shot here that you can almost hear curdling reality and the ending has a 1-2 punch combo of seeing too much and suddenly realising we can’t see enough. The Smile plays with its food and Finn maps that playful predation onto the movie’s best moments. That ending is one of them but for me, there’s a beat at the top of the third act that is flat out chilling. You’ll know it when you see it. And you’ll be seeing it for a while.

Verdict: Smile is one of the best of the modern crop of Blumhouse and Blumhouse-esque horror movies. It’s inventive, playful, cruel and confident in the last way you’d expect from a debut like this. I’m thrilled to see where the series goes next. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart