Smile (2022)

Directed by Parker Finn. Starring Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert, Jessie T. Usher, Kal Penn, Gillian Zinser, Judy Reyes, Jack Sochet, Caitlin Stasey, Dora Kiss, Rob Morgan. [R]

Guilt and trauma horror tropes run rampant in this tepid tale of a psychologist (Bacon) losing her grip on sanity (or is she?) trying to figure out why one of her patients wore a creepy grin and committed suicide in spectacular fashion right before Bacon’s very eyes, and why she’s plagued by horrifying visions and incidents in the aftermath. “Smiles” aplenty, but not so much on the logic or innovation fronts, as the script haphazardly borrows from numerous horror flicks, from It Follows to Ringu, but the pastiche is even less rigorous to its own made-up rules than those pics (more on the level of Truth or Dare, another movie this one resembles, but it’s overall not as bad as all that, thank goodness). Far more unintentionally funny than intentionally frightening, and if it had been trying to be hysterical, or leaned into the reckless inanity of its central conceit and gone balls-to-the-walls batty with the underwritten material (like, say, Malignant or most of Sam Raimi’s horror oeuvre), it might have worked. Instead, it overuses the fake-out hallucination trick so often, I lost all interest in what was going to happen by the climax. Bacon tries her best to keep all the heightened drama and wits-end hysterics at least partially grounded, but it’s a losing battle for the actress, who may be Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick’s daughter, but looks like a cross between Ally Sheedy and Evangeline Lilly. Not a good sign when the marketing campaign is more memorable than the movie being promoted.

41/100