smile movie review 2022

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‘Smile’ Review: The Demons Grin Back at You in a Horror Movie With a Highly Effective Creep Factor

A therapist looks like she's losing her mind in a shocker that puts a happy face on trauma.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Smile ” is a horror film that sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits. In an emergency psych ward, Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ), a diligent and devoted therapist, is speaking to a woman who sounds like her soul went to hell and never made it back. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stasey), and she describes, in tones that remain rational despite her tremulous panic, the visions she’s been seeing that no one else can.

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The smile, as a signifier of maniacal fear, goes back a long way. Just think of Jack-’o-lanterns and the Joker, or the leer that flashed across the mottled face of Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil, or the rictus grins in a movie like “Insidious” or the movie that inspired it, the great 1962 low-budget freak-show classic “Carnival of Souls.” In “Smile,” the first-time writer-director Parker Finn, drawing on films like “Hereditary” and “It Follows” and “The Strangers,” turns the human smile into a spooky vector of the shadow world of evil. The movie has a shivery quality that I, for one, thought “Black Phone” lacked. Yet I wish “Smile” were more willing to be…suggestive.

If you’re haunted by visions of people smiling at you, but no one else sees them, the world is going to think you’re crazy, and much of the drama in “Smile” revolves around Rose looking like a therapist who’s lost her mind. Sosie Bacon, who’s like a taut neurasthenic Geneviève Bujold, creates an impressive spectrum of anxiety, tugging the audience into her nightmare. It makes sense that Rose, teaming up with her police-officer ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), turns herself into an investigator, because that’s what therapists are (at least the good ones). And she’s got a primal trauma of her own: the suicide of her mother, which we glimpse in the film’s opening moments. “Smile” lifts, from “Hereditary,” the idea that the emotional and psychological demons that are passed down through families are our own real-life ghosts. But in this case it’s a megaplex metaphor: literal, free of nuance, illustrated (at the climax) with a demon who sheds her skin, all the better to get inside yours.

There’s a good scene set at Rose’s nephew’s seventh birthday party, where the usual tuneless singing of “Happy Birthday” melts the film into a trance, and the kid unwraps a present that stops the party dead in its tracks. But I would have liked to see three more scenes this dramatic — especially in a movie that lasts 115 minutes. “Smile” will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie. (And why is “Lollipop,” the 1958 hit by the Chordettes, played over the closing credits? It’s one of my favorite songs, but it has zero connection to anything in the movie.) Yet let’s give “Smile” credit for taking a deep dive into the metaphysics of smile horror. The nature of a smile is that it draws you into a connection with the person who’s smiling. That’s why the forces who come after Rose are more than just bogeywomen. That’s why it feels like they’re meant for her.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, Sept. 26, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 115 MIN.

Production: A Paramount Pictures release, in association with Paramount Players, of a Temple Hill Entertainment production. Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Robert Salerno. Executive producer: Adam Fishbach.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Parker Finn. Camera: Charlie Sarroff. Editor: Eeliott Greenberg. Music: Cristobal “Christo” Tapia de Veer.
With: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robert Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan.

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Smile Reviews

It's not the most original film of recent years... [but] it uses a familiar box of tricks rather well.

Full Review | Jan 3, 2024

If the sight of a person grinning like an idiot is enough to unnerve you, then you might well be the target audience for Smile -- me, I’ll stick with Jack Nicholson’s Joker for my maniacal grimaces.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 28, 2023

“Smile” works on its own terms immersed with Cotter, wound too tight and with people closest to her turning superficial and nonreciprocating; the care and support she shows them and others is unavailable to her.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

Smile got right under my skin in a way I didn’t expect… anxiety inducing moments, & an a completely unhinged performance from Sosie Bacon! This movie really will make you afraid of smiles

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Smile is nothing revolutionary, but it is creepy, and sometimes that’s enough. It’s more memorable than any recent iteration of Paranormal Activity and will certainly be a hit at sleepovers.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

There were some aspects that were interesting but a lot of moments made me roll my eyes. The last twenty minutes got my attention but it was too little, too late at that point.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 30, 2023

I did not have fun watching this. Relying too much on jump scares and not enough pay-off.

Don’t look away. Just keep smiling through it.

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

Smile shows itself as a strange mixture of goldsmithing and cheap jewelry: the more unconscious it is of its own message and the further it is from giving its monsters a total shape (physical or metaphorical), the closer it is to saying something real.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 25, 2023

... Its formal technique transforms a film full of clichés into an average story that manages to make an impact at the right moments. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 20, 2023

Even with the similarities to other films in mind, Smile proves itself to be its own beast of a horror.

Full Review | Jan 28, 2023

Finn uses the strength of his conceit to turn the screws, raising tension through the Ring-like timeline Rose faces and the sheer relentlessness of her supernatural tormentor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 19, 2022

Building a horror film that feels both familiar and invigorating at the same time, Finn’s Smile delivers enough chills to satisfy.

Full Review | Dec 15, 2022

I watched the entire movie through my fingers. Starring Sosie Bacon her constant panic is operatic. She was terrifying in her out-of-control hysteria.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2022

Smile is an intense horror film dealing with survivor’s guilt that exceeds all expectations. By the film’s end, I found my palms sweating — something I’d never experienced.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 30, 2022

A bone-rattling, brain-flipping chiller sure to be ranked highly by true fans of the genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 30, 2022

We see and hear the stifling moods of fear and frustration Finn can evoke and we wish they weren’t yoked to such a nothing-special story.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Nov 22, 2022

I think I can speak for all of us when I say, no one expected Smile to be quite as good as it turned out to be, but it’s such a joy to watch a truly exciting new horror film on the big screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 19, 2022

Finn is a strong visual director, tilting and pivoting the camera and using shadows, upsetting bits of body horror and distortion effects to generate some potent atmosphere. But he struggles in other ways...

Full Review | Nov 16, 2022

A disturbing and visceral descent into a chilling and tragic nightmare. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Nov 9, 2022

Smile (V) (2022)

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Smile review – sadistically effective supernatural horror

Sosie Bacon excels as a psychiatrist pursued by an evil curse in Parker Finn’s derivative yet solidly scary feature debut

P sychiatric specialist Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) has dedicated her life to caring for the most damaged members of society. But one case shakes her – a distressed young woman who claims to be pursued by a shape-shifting evil entity with “the worst smile I have ever seen in my life”. To Rose’s horror, the girl takes a piece of shattered crockery and carves an arcing crescent into her own throat. And she smiles – a deranged, flesh-stretching gash of a grin – while doing so. Soon Rose starts to see her own ghoulish smirking figures, and embarks on a race against time to understand the transferable curse which has latched on to her, a malevolent parasitic presence which feeds on trauma.

The premise to this sadistically effective horror is admittedly not an original one – there are thematic similarities with The Ring , It Follows and others. And there’s nothing especially novel about director Parker Finn’s approach, which favours Dutch angles and jump-scares galore. But the combination of a committed central performance from the increasingly gaunt and haunted Bacon, and a jarring, tortured score, makes for an enjoyably nasty brush with the smiling face of evil.