‘Smile’ Is an Audacious Horror-fication of Suicide
Sosie Bacon gives her all to a pastiche of horror movie tropes in Parker Finn's debut feature.
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If you’re going to be a nepo baby, you better work. The new horror movie Smile features a stunning performance from Sosie Bacon, who exists one degree away from Kevin Bacon, as he is her father (Kyra Sedgwick is her mother). Parker Finn’s debut film puts its protagonist through hell, and Bacon wears it well, which is to say her shivering, jumpy performance that is the film’s centerpiece (rare is the shot that is not trained on her) does much to elevate material quilted from extremely familiar elements.
Smile is cut from the same curse-movie cloth as The Ring: Rose (Bacon) is a psychiatrist whose patient kills herself in front of her after describing horrific visions of people with demonic smiles. “It feels like people, but it’s not a person,” explains the patient before taking her own life. Rose is powerless to help, and then even more powerless over the curse that gives her similar hallucinations and a strong hankering for suicide. That’s how this social contagion works: Someone kills themself in front of you and prompts you to do the same. Rose’s plight is underlined by her virtue—she argues with her boss Dr. Morgan Desai (Kal Penn) about his reluctance to treat an uninsured patient. She wouldn’t have even seen the woman from whom she contracted the curse were it not for a sense of duty that had her rushing back to her office after clocking out for the day when she heard her phone ring. So devoted to her job is Rose that, as her partner says, “She’d do it for free.”