Smile
Smile
After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, a psychiatrist becomes increasingly convinced she is being threatened by an uncanny entity.
brycoward reviewedOctober 29, 2024
A little bit "The Ring" and a little bit "It Follows". A fantastic exploration of grief, of not addressing pain, and the consuming nature of trauma.
The character, particularly the protagonist and her partner, and story-telling with respect to the post curse behavior are wanting. The main character, a therapist, fails to couch any of her behavior in a way to explain it to her collogues; she fails to attempt to explain it with anything which would be explainable to others. She fails to ask to be restrained. She fails to reason that the prior victim committed a violent suicide in front of others, and therefore she needed to prevent that outcome.
Similarly, her partner immediately becomes an unhelpful jerk, suspicious of his extremely reasonable, professional mental health expert partner. Those behaviors could very easily have been changed to be more in character, and the story would largely have been fine.