Sypnosis
"Smile" is a type of movie genre whereby someone who looks at or does something and then is cursed over the course of the movie and has a limited time to live. But in this movie's case it is about a therapist who witnesses a patient with a creepy smile commiting suicide. And the curse is passed on and the therapist begins to have hallucinations of people; either strangers or people she's familiar with, giving her the same creepy smile the patient had.
Smile did a pretty job in making this movie a really terrifying one. Sosie Bacon did a really fantastic job in the film, and you spend a majority of the movie with this character. The movie also did a good job of making you feel empathy and sadness for as long as it went. It is a movie that dives deep into it's theme about mental health and suicide. The more these takes over her she gets more ostracized from her friends, her family and her fiance, where her paranoia and anxiety sets in deep, making only very few people believing her.
This also forces her to confront her past with the mental issues of her mother. The acting is all around great, especially Kyle Gallner–who is her former boyfriend and cop, who is the only person who listens to her.
What I liked about the movie
In my opinion, the movie was a perfect execution of horror. The way they managed to handle the audio in the movie was indeed fantastic. It was super quiet when it needed to be, and in those scenes where it was super quiet would leave someone with an uneasy feeling. I literally was shivering a little bit in some of those scenes, having not the slightest idea what was going to happen next. The audio quality of the movie didn't even help matters instead it intensified that feeling.
I mean it's like you want to hear something but it's super quiet. And when that jump scare comes up it lands perfectly, most of the time. The one thing I love about horror movies is when it gives you that jump scare that you are not expecting. And this movie managed to execute this.
There were jump scares that you were expecting that would come but they didn't come, while they were ones that came when you were least expecting them like two scenes or two shots later. That left me uneasy and that was an aspect I really loved about the movie.
The camera handling was quite impressive in the aspect that they were scenes where it was focused on characters one at a time. All through the movie a feeling of intensity and nervousness comes upon you. There were scenes that will get you tilting your head downwards because of fear of what may happen next. It's like you want to see what will happen and at the same time you don't want to see neither.
Aspect I didn't like about the movie
As much as I love the movie, there was one aspect they handled. I felt like there were too many fake out sequences in the movie. Even if there was context for it, it was a trickery that happened one to many times, especially towards the end, which made it go from realistic to unrealistic for me. I kind of hated that feeling.
If I'm to rate this movie I'll give it an 8 out of 10 because of how they handled this final aspect of it.
