Film Review: Unsettling & Unpleasant ‘Smile’ is Also Deadly … Boring

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CHICAGO – Smile is unsettling and deeply unpleasant … its whole reason for being is to be unsettling and deeply unpleasant. And in that regard, it worked. I was uncomfortable sitting in a theater as these images flashed across the screen. But you know what else I was? Bored. The first kill happens around the 15 minute mark, and I know that because I was already checking my watch at that point.

Rating: 0.5/5.0

The main character is an overworked therapist named Doctor Cotter (Sosie Bacon) at a run down psychiatric hospital. Still troubled by her own mother’s suicide years earlier, she provides help to the poor and in need. But the Cotter is traumatized all over again when a patient tells her about frightening images she’s been seeing.

The patient then takes her own life with a grin that would make Jack Nicholson’s Joker look positively friendly by comparison. Soon enough the good doctor is seeing the same things her patient talked about and figures out she’s being haunted. She soon figures out the deaths all follow a pattern, and begins criss crossing New Jersey trying to cheat her own death.

Continue reading for Spike Walter’s full review of “Smile”

Smile
Photo credit: Paramount Pictures

Continue reading for Spike Walter’s full review of “Smile”