I never thought I would be so creeped out by a person just giving me a polite smile, but here we are.
Dr. Rose Cotter is a caring, loving doctor who wants nothing more than to help her patients with their mental health. After working far too many hours and not really giving herself any rest she is about to head home when she gets a call to meet with a grad student who is possibly having a full-on mental breakdown. Laura, the student, recently witnessed firsthand her professor kill himself. Not in a normal fashion either. He bludgeoned himself to death with a claw hammer right in front of her. Since then she has been seeing… something. Whatever it is that she is seeing is following her. Taunting her. Tormenting her. Dr. Cotter is hesitant to believe her but wants to help in some way. Unfortunately whatever Laura has been seeing catches up to her again. However this time it forces her to kill herself right in front of Dr. Cotter.
After a traumatic experience like that Rose needs to go home, collect herself, and decompress. However, once she is home things don’t get any better. She is jumpy, emotional, and generally on edge. Again, this could all be from witnessing what she did, but much worse than that, Rose has started seeing the same exact things that Laura was just before her death.
Lots of horror movies don’t care to even approach the “terror” factor and just go full-on gore. That’s fine there is a place for that. Smile takes suspense and terror and really drills it home. Personally, I have only really two big fears in my life. Fears that pop up more frequently than I like to admit. One of them is a fear of deep dark water… not sure where it comes from, but still real. The other one, and one that frankly is much more valid and unsettling, is losing my grip on reality, and my memory. This movie somewhat feeds into part of that in a way I really do not like.
Honestly, when you boil this film down to its base, it’s not much different from The Ring. Someone sees something happen and eventually that thing will happen to them and the process continues. The difference here is that the only way to fix it isn’t pretty.
The movie is mostly predictable if only for all the ways in which it wants to scare you. There were a couple of times when it did give me chills but once it played that card, it was easy to see the next couple of times it was going to try it. I will say that it is well-acted, and the bits of horror (outside of the tension) that they throw in are good. The end of the film I saw coming, but it was pulled off well enough. I think I can say this is a good one to watch. It has enough to set it apart from other films like it. One thing though, just like The Ring, I found myself laughing at parts of the film that were not meant to be funny… except the birthday party. That was just messed up.
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