Smile

Smile sees Doctor Rose Cotter go head to head with a mysterious grinning entity but what happens at the end of this terrifying horror movie.

As he watches, Rose lights a match, and we cut to black with Joel, the next victim in the monster’s chain of murders. Rose tells the creature that as it’s locked in her mind, it lacks any power, and after a brief scuffle, she gets the upper hand setting the beast on fire. Just kidding, this entire bit was a hallucination, and Rose is still in the house with the creature. While there, Rose confronts her past – specifically her mother’s suicide – and the monster tries to manipulate her into leaving. Talley claims that if you commit a horrible enough murder in front of a witness, the entity will be passed on to the person who saw the crime. Together they work out the chain of suicides and eventually trace it back far enough to an incarcerated man called Robert Talley who killed his business partner after coming into contact with the creature.

Writer/director Parker Finn's feature debut “Smile” boasts the thinnest of premises based on a laundry list of horror movie trends and tropes, ...

The main character in “Smile,” Rose Cotter (Bacon), is a therapist who catches the curse from a young woman in the throes of a debilitating mental health crisis (Caitlin Stasey) after witnessing a suicide. It’s a technique that Finn liberally abuses in “Smile,” almost to comedic effect. Writer/director Parker Finn’s feature debut “Smile” boasts the thinnest of premises based on a laundry list of horror movie trends and tropes, from the historical to the contemporary.

Director Parker Finn discusses his terrifying new horror Smile, about a psychiatrist experiencing frightening occurrences she can't explain – all linked ...

“Smiles are meant to be really warm gestures, of friendliness and kindness, and invitation,” he notes. It has frightening moments that I think are going to cause audiences to jump out of their seats! Of course, creepy smiles have long been haunting film audiences, from the Joker and the Riddler, to Pennywise’s painted grin, to famous images of Ted Bundy and Charles Manson smiling manically. I was a video store kid who used to go around the backs of VHS boxes and spook myself with what I thought the movies might be about, until I actually got to see them – and then scared myself even more! “That really freaked me out, when Jack goes into Room 237 and finds the nasty woman in the bathtub. “I was reading Fangoria and really got interested in horror as a child,” he recalls.

On September 26, at the Berlin Marathon, the Kenyon long-distance runner broke his own global 26.2 record by a full 30 seconds (2018: two hours, one minute, 39 ...

It may be the placebo effect, but I genuinely feel that Kipchoge energy coursing through me as I slowly make my way to today's finish line. "A more recent study, in 2018 in the Psychology of Sports and Exercise, suggested that smiling while running could make it easier "You are going to signal to your brain that you are having a good experience when you are smiling, so it will make anything you do seem 'less horrible,'" says Haapanen. I opt for one of my neighborhood routes and head out for a few early morning miles. "Darwin suggested that facial expressions can intensify or lessen your emotions, an effect that was termed the ' And, more importantly, to genuinely enjoy the distance ahead of you.

"Once you see it, it's too late." Thus is the premise for Parker Finn's debut feature film Smile, in a concept that tackles generational trauma and mental ...

“That’s a great question!” he said. “I like complex, messy, sometimes ambiguous endings that can stir debate,” he explained. “I think we’re all walking around with all this stuff in our heads, right, whether it’s trauma, anxiety, fears, stress,” he said. While he didn’t have any specific jumpscares that he took inspiration from, Finn said that “it all becomes kind of… Going into the film, Finn said that he was “really interested in exploring” all the “stuff” that’s going on in our heads on a day-to-day basis, “and the ways that we sort of try to mask that from the world”. [The Shining](https://thelatch.com.au/jordan-peele-favourite-movies/), Possession, The Thing and [A Nightmare on Elm Street](https://thelatch.com.au/what-to-watch-after-stranger-things-season-four/) are his favourite horror films, but that he “could go on and on”.

Adapted from a ten minute short called Laura Hasn't Slept the film follows psychiatrist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) who after witnessing a new patient kill ...

A moment of someone ripping their own face off is funny not scary, and by the end, the confrontation with the entity is taken straight from It: Chapter Two. What follows in the film is a rip-off of both The Ring and It Follows but with none of the dread or character development. His screenplay is pretty poor, and it’s not that you can’t make a good horror from a short film – both The Babadook and Lights Out were terrific horror films spun from shorts, it’s that the idea isn’t the most original.

A tense and terrifying look at mental health with a supernatural twist. Smile Review Image. Ryan Leston. By Ryan Leston.

Revealed as part of Ubisoft Forward's Assassin's Creed Showcase, Assassin's Creed Mirage casts you as Basim Ibn Ishaq and is set in the city of Baghdad, twenty years before the events of Assassin's Creed Valhalla.](/videos/assassins-creed-mirage-reveal-trailer-ubisoft-forward-2022) A brief appearance from Rob Morgan is brilliantly paced as he transforms from rational to utterly terrified in the blink of an eye. But Bacon wears the weariness of a well-meaning therapist in those early scenes… Smile may borrow heavily from other horror films, but it certainly brings something unique to the table, and I’m not just talking about that creepy smile. Cotter, with an incredible performance that gets to the heart of mental health anxiety while grounding the sheer hysterics of being pursued by a supernatural entity. The very bloody and visceral nature of the deaths is offset by the weird, ethereal emptiness of its victims’ faces. And that’s when you begin to realize that the almost laughable frequency of these moments is doing something else entirely. Sosie Bacon is an absolute thrill to watch as the ever-deteriorating Dr. and the really fun part is that you’ll rarely get it right. But where these movies seem to have inspired Smile, director Parker Finn uses our knowledge of their well-worn tropes to make something a little different.That’s not to say that Smile is a wholly original film – it isn’t. Sure, it’s not the most subtle of metaphors – at times, Cotter’s world is turned literally upside down with almost stomach-churning inverted landscape shots. This ruthlessly effective, anxiety-inducing nightmare that tells the horrifying story of Dr.

A psychiatrist fleeing her own trauma discovers a grisly, self-replicating chain of destruction.

Apart from MR James, I found myself thinking of the Kafkaesque short story that Billy Wilder wrote while working as a journalist in Berlin in the 1920s called And then with a grisly self-destructive flourish, the awful smile itself breaks cover, and Rose realises that it is coming to get her too, and she faces a terrible choice if she wants to escape its curse. A deeply disturbed young woman is brought in, wretched with fear and lack of sleep, telling Rose about a hideously smiling demon that stalks her, inhabiting the bodies of various people: some are friends, some are random strangers.

Anchored by a great performance by Sosie Bacon, Parker Finn's feature debut is impressively unnerving—if you're up for it.

Smile is unable to resist the temptation of a potential sequel, but Finn delivers an effective resolution nonetheless. It helps set the mood that Rose, even when pursued by an evil presence, keeps her house lights set at extra dim and her phone ringer at extra loud. Consequently, nobody believes her when she starts seeing the smile herself, least of all her conservative supervisor Dr. The most effective scares involve variations on Hideo Nakata’s best one in Dark Water, where a character suddenly realizes there’s a scary thing right beside or behind them, and slowly, grudgingly turns to look at it, only to find it’s even worse than imagined. It may take time and repeated viewings to be sure just how good or bad Smile is as a movie, but as a scare delivery device, it is damned effective. At least until the climax escalates its stakes, Finn’s debut seems like it was pretty cost-effective, too, since the movie’s primary threat is a malevolent presence which mostly disguises itself as one of Stanley Kubrick’s most famous shots as a director.

Sosie Bacon leads Parker Finn's 'Smile,' about a woman haunted and hunted by her trauma.

She tries to explain her experience to Trevor and her sister, Holly (Gillian Zinser), and attempts to get a prescription for anxiety medication from her therapist, who feeds her platitudes about the nature of trauma. The only person Rose realizes she can confide in is her ex-boyfriend, Joel (Kyle Gallner), a police officer who also happens to be the only person she ever felt vulnerable with. [Taylor Swift](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/taylor-swift/) [‘Amsterdam’ Review: Christian Bale and Margot Robbie Head Starry Ensemble in David O. For all its wandering in predictable territory, Smile could easily have been consigned to the mounting pile of contemporary work exploring trauma; clichés about hurt people hurting others and healing one’s inner child do at times claw their way to center stage here. They stop listening and, therefore, stop seeing Rose — leaving her to face her demons alone. She has always been good at compartmentalizing her life, relegating painful memories to the back of her mind. Her boss (Kal Penn) spews pithy statements about mental health and employee happiness, her fiancé harshly wonders what this will mean for his life, and her sister compares Rose to their mother, who also suffered from mental disorders and committed suicide. The camera (the DP is Charlie Sarroff) doesn’t flinch in the face of this suicide, which is soundtracked by Rose’s blood-curdling screams; it moves in, steadily meditating on the lacerated skin. [Sosie Bacon](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/sosie-bacon/)), an affable clinical psychiatrist, doesn’t know any of this when she meets Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey), a graduate student who recently witnessed a gruesome suicide. Smile’s screenplay, which Finn wrote, confidently sketches Rose, but doesn’t demonstrate the same assurance when it comes to other characters like her fiancé, Trevor (Jesse T. Smiles — warm and inviting by nature — mask deeper, more troubling intentions in this harrowing film about a demonic spirit that latches on to its victims’ traumas. The adage about grinning through hard times here takes on a sinister tone.

The plot trappings might seem familiar, but writer-director Parker Finn creates something very new and very terrifying.

There are shots in “Smile” that are as frightening as any you’ll find in established horror classics, but it’s the savvy build-up to those spine-tingling scenes that makes them all the more powerful. “Smile” pulls the audience into that state and uses acts of cinematic violence — not just images of brutality but brutal tricks of editing and sound — to keep refreshing the anxiety in our heads. A film like “Smile” could have easily rested on its laurels and repeatedly tried to frighten the audience with unexpected grinning ghouls, but instead we’re treated to a veritable smorgasbord of twisted imagery. Cinematographer Charlie Sarroff (“Relic”) covers the film’s action in sharp right angles, giving wide views of Rose’s surroundings and offering the audience a false impression of security. What’s absolutely riveting about “Smile” is the way Finn consistently absorbs the audience in Rose’s foggy mindset. Her attempts to uncover the mystery and figure out the mechanics are necessary for the plot to transpire, but they’re the least interesting part about the movie (although still pretty interesting).

Is the 2022 movie Smile streaming online? Find out where to watch Smile and when to expect Smile on Paramount+.

While The Lost City came to digital on the same day it was released on Paramount+, the release of Jackass Forever on Paramount+ was not accompanied by a VOD release. movie, and therefore will not be streaming on HBO Max when it opens in theaters. Last year, Paramount announced all of its titles would be moving to Paramount+ after 30 days in theaters, while big tentpole titles would get 45 days in theaters. Smile will open in theaters in the U.S on Friday, September 30. The movie may be on HBO Max someday, but it won’t be any time soon. Basically, after you watch this film, you’ll never want to smile for a photo again.

The trailer for Parker Finn's feature film debut Smile enticed the internet and drummed up intrigue for this high-concept horror when it was posted to ...

This film is not for the faint of heart. The original Japanese film that started the franchise, changed J-horror forever, and inspired countless American-Japanese horror remakes, Ringu, has many of the same elements as the American remake but is much more avant-garde and disjointed. The Ring - The other film horror fans have already compared Smile to is the iconic film The Ring. The Hidebehind won the Special Jury Award at the 2019 South by Southwest Film Festival and the Jury Award at the 2019 Portland Horror Film Festival. With the incredible cultural impact this film had, it would be unsurprising to learn filmmaker Parker Finn was inspired by the film's use of psychological stress by taunting the protagonist with their own death. Men - Released earlier in 2022, Men is the newest film by writer and director Alex Garland (Ex-Machina). Laura Hasn't Slept was the inspiration for Smile, and unfortunately, the film seems to have been removed from the internet. [Smile](https://collider.com/smile-review-sosie-bacon-parker-finn/) enticed the internet and drummed up intrigue for this high-concept horror when it was posted to YouTube in June of this year. With the release of Smile's trailer, the two films immediately drew comparisons for their use of supernatural forces that inhabit the bodies of others to stalk their victims. The film has already garnered comparison to popular horror films such as [It Follows](https://collider.com/it-follows-review/) and The Ring for its premise, involving an unseen terror threatening an untimely end. Actor [Kal Penn](https://collider.com/tag/kal-penn/), recognizable to comedy fans as the titular Kumar from Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle and its resulting sequels, plays Dr. Usher](https://collider.com/the-boys-season-4-jessie-usher-violence-comments/), best known for his role as The Flash parallel A-Train on the Amazon Prime series The Boys, has been cast in a supporting role, though he is not shown in the trailer.

'Smile' is too thin to run as long as it does, but it offers some fun scares and gross-out images amid a subtext-becomes-text riff on trauma-focused horror ...

It starts so close to the ground and escalates so quickly that it becomes monotonous as we wait for what is or isn’t in store. Sosie Bacon is as good as she needs to be, even if she is merely tasked with being anxious and on the verge of meltdown for the entire movie. Smile frankly offers little ‘new’ to the sub-genre, with too many of the film’s biggest jolts being fake-outs or ‘just a cat’-type cons. It’s mostly a waiting game to see if the good doctor can avoid her Ring/Drag Me to Hell-ish fate, while details about the circumstances offer up some over-the-top crime scene photos and just a little bit of detective work. However, it’s structured in such a way to make much of the present-tense menace null-and-void while relying far too often on dream sequences and fake-outs. Opening theatrically tomorrow night courtesy of Paramount, Parker Finn’s Smile often plays as a skewed subtext-made-text riff on the last few years of ‘It’s all about trauma!’ horror movies.

During an interview with CBR ahead of Smile's theatrical release on Sept. 30, Finn spoke about the effect his previous short film had on his new horror movie, ...

I always wanted to tell a story that was deeply psychological and had all these internal elements at work, that when you have all these external bombastic elements at the same time, you're kind of weaving them together until they become indistinguishable from one another. I think for me, I think the unknown is one of the scariest things out there. I think, really, the idea of the story always had that ambiguity infused inside of it. Was that always an aspect of the film, or was there ever any temptation to make that aspect more perceptible? I was just so impressed and proud of the performance that Sosie Bacon turned in. [Paramount Pictures](https://www.cbr.com/tag/paramount-pictures/) enough to expand the concept, Smile is a good indicator of how unsettling the creative can take things -- and highlights the things that terrify Parker specifically.

I have mostly frowny faces for “Smile,” a bluntly unsettling and blandly grim new horror flick that wrings as much mileage as it can out of a twisted grin.

“Smile,” a Paramount Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for strong violent content and grisly images, and language. But it still makes “Smile” a cynical and shallow piece of work unlikely to put a you-know-what on too many faces. That’s just one of many derivative elements to “Smile,” a horror movie that makes a few feeble gestures at sliding toward the so-called elevated variety of horror (like a couple upside-down shots that recall the vastly superior “Midsommar”). “Smile” is far from the first to trade on trauma as a plot device but it may do so more than any other film I can remember. There are moments here and there that suggest “Smile” might actually invest in its protagonist’s grief. “Smile,” of course, isn’t the first film to think trouble can lurk behind a smile.

I have mostly frowny faces for “Smile,” a bluntly unsettling and blandly grim new...