Smile was definitely a good movie for me to catch, even with other priorities like Amsterdam waiting unseen, due to the sort of disappointing start I've gotten to October horror viewing. To wit, I've started off with a new horror comedy that was only so-so (My Best Friend's Exorcism); a revisit of a 2020 horror I'd loved, but didn't hold up on second viewing (Nocturne); and Rob Zombie's 2007 version of Halloween, which was tedious and not at all scary.
Smile was not all I had hoped it to be either, though. That's largely because I liked it better the first time, when it was called It Follows.
If you don't know the premise of the movie, it's that there's a contagious entity that ends up killing the person it inhabits. It is passed from person to person when the first person kills him or herself, and the second person witnesses it. That person starts freaking out and seeing creepy smiling figures wherever they go, and within a week's time, they become the creepy smiling figure at the moment of their own suicide, which is witnessed by the next person in the chain. And so on. And so forth.
It's not a sexually transmitted demon as in the David Robert Mitchell film, but it's close enough.
The similarities don't end there though. Both films:
1) Have people who are always explaining the rules of how it works.
2) Reveal to us that the figure can come in any form, either a stranger or someone you know, maybe even someone long dead.
3) Suggest that the only way to rid yourself of the curse is to pass it on to someone else.
The means of passing it in Smile is to kill someone else, in front of a witness of course. Because then the witness receives the curse without its previous host having to end their own life.
This is not to say I didn't enjoy Smile, just that it's not the groundbreaker it might think it is. In fact, it's rather obviously not that groundbreaker.
Some other Smile thoughts:
1) There are a couple really good jump scares in this movie, but the single creepiest moment is when the protagonist sees a shadowy figure of the girl who committed suicide in front of her earlier that day, in the dark of her kitchen, with only the smile peering through like the Cheshire Cat.
2) That protagonist is played by Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. I had never seen her before. I didn't think she was quite charismatic enough.
3) Some actors are better with the creepy smile than others. You really want the eyes to be cavernous and dead, and some people just don't have the face for it.
4) The ending is, in some people's mind, a bit of a shocker, but if actually sort of reminded me of a much better horror movie from 2021 that I loved -- though to avoid spoilers for that movie, I won't mention it here.
See it, but don't expect it to make your Halloween season, if you've gotten off to a similar lethargic start as I have.
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