Smile
Smile
After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, a psychiatrist becomes increasingly convinced she is being threatened by an uncanny entity.
Kevin Ward reviewedJuly 6, 2025
My kids were traumatized by the trailers for this movie several times and my wife can’t handle horror. She had full fledged breakdown in the parking lot after I took her to see IT Chapter 1. That’s the last horror movie I watched with my wife.
So for my b-day after celebrating, they released me to the theater to watch Smile on my own. It was a treat.
Smile has a few of the best scares I’ve seen in a horror film from the last couple years. It’s really well shot incorporating some artful camera angles, rotations and inversions. Sosie Bacon gives a terrific and emotional performance as clinical psychologist Rose Cotter that witnesses a patient commit a horrific suicide before her very eyes. I won’t go much more into the plot other than to say he focuses very much on how trauma and/or PTSD can be passed on to one another, particularly when it goes unresolved. It’s a really interesting idea that incorporates a classic horror trope from films like The Ring and It Follows. I did feel like it dragged ever so slightly in the middle. There’s a stretch where there’s no significant scares and the narrative becomes a little repetitive. But when Rose starts towards the endgame it took some wildly unexpected turns. (Not like Barbarian level WTF, but still really fun). Really impressive debut film from Parker Finn