Review of SMILE: Grim Grin

October 2, 2022

Psychological therapist Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) was attending to Laura (Caitlin Stasey), a PhD candidate who saw her Professor Munoz commit suicide in front of her. Since then, Laura claims that she can see people giving her a sinister smile which is making her feel and act crazy. During their interview, Laura seemingly saw something that made her scream in fear, give a weird smile and cut her neck with a shard of broken pottery.

After this incident, Rose began to see and hear mysterious things going on around her making her increasingly paranoid. Rose fell out with her fiance Trevor (Jesse T. Usher) and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinser) who both could not understand her disturbing behavior. An ex-boyfriend police officer Joel (Kyle Gallner) helped her track down a grisly series of people who had the same bizarre symptoms as hers, all leading up to grotesque suicides.

The trailer pretty much tells us what this film was going to be about some kind of a supernatural curse that caused its victims to see evil smiles on people around him that later led to a deadly fate. This film had a premise built on the increasing paranoia being experienced by lead character Rose was expanded to an almost 2-hour long movie with unsettling images, possessive monsters and a constant creepiness all throughout. 

The main brunt of keeping up the intense psychological edge of this movie fell on its lead star Sosie Bacon (yes, she is the daughter of Kevin Bacon). We feel her maddening frustration as she portrayed Rose's efforts to convince people she's not crazy with behavior that certainly made her look crazy. It was good to see a much-heftier Kal Penn back on the big screen, this time as Rose's senior consultant. Jesse T. Usher, whom I only knew before as the irritatingly cocky A-Train on "The Boys," was effortlessly annoying as Rose's irritatingly cocky fiance.

Writer-director Parker Finn had an 11-minute short film "Laura Hasn't Slept" about a young insomniac woman consulting her therapist about how her nightmare about a man with a creepy smile has seeped into her real life. Finn has expanded the premise of this short into his debut full-length feature film. He cast his original Laura, Caitlin Stasey, as the patient whose suicide started it all for her therapist Rose. Finn had stuffed his film with enough jump-scares and malevolent energy to keep horror fans at the edge of their seats. 6/10.