Smile

You go to a movie like Smile for some quick jolts, and it provides.  This is a well-executed little thriller that will make you jump more than once.  It's not the most original horror movie out there, and it's certainly not the smartest.  But first time feature director Parker Finn (adapting from his own short film) plays his audience well.

The plot centers on an overworked psychiatric doctor named Rose (Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin Bacon), who takes on a new patient named Laura (Caitlin Stasey), a PhD student who witnessed her professor take his own life just one week ago.  Since then, Laura claims that she's being followed by a presence that only she can see, and can take the form of anyone from her past.  Each time she sees the entity, it bears a sinister grin and tells her that she's going to die.  During the session, Laura seemingly sees the presence in the room with them, though Rose sees nothing.  Poor Rose only has her back turned for a minute, but when she looks back at Laura, the girl is smiling at her evilly before she slits her own throat.

This incident naturally haunts Rose, and it's not long after that she too starts seeing the same sinister presence that Laura was talking about.  The people in her life including her supervisor at work (Kal Penn), her sister (Gillian Zinser), and even her fiance (Jessie T. Usher) aren't sure how to react when she tries to explain what's happening.  The only one who just might be convinced is her ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), a police officer who begins to dig into a series of bizarre suicides that are similar to what she's talking about.  The movie owes a heavy debt to films like The Ring or It Follows when we learn that the evil spirit is a curse that is passed along from one person to another, and haunts a person for up to a week before they die.

Writer-director Finn does not really try to explain much behind his evil, and perhaps it's for the best.  Smile works as a "Boo Machine" movie, where it sets up some effective and quick scares that are unsettling.  When you try to apply logic to the plot, the movie quickly loses its effectiveness.  There's a scene involving a kid's birthday party and a dead cat that I'm still trying to figure out exactly how or why it happened.  The movie is also pretty thin when it comes to character, as many possess a single trait to carry through the entire story.  Some, like Rose's disbelieving fiance who becomes increasingly concerned for her sanity, just completely disappear from the film without any explanation whatsoever.  

The reason why the film works despite this is because the director understands an important thing that Stephen King once said when it comes to writing horror; "Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations".  Horror films are supposed to get a reaction from the audience, and this one does.  It's well made, effectively gets under your skin while you're watching it, and features an unnerving music score to aid the suspense.  This may not be the smartest or best thought out thriller, but it knows exactly what it's doing.  Like King said, it knows that the fun comes from the experience it gives to the audience, not in trying to explain itself.

Smile is the kind of movie that you enjoy seeing with the right audience in a dark theater, and then probably never think about again after.  Regardless, we need these kind of films just as much as we need the big, important ones that start to show up in the Fall season.  No one will ever mistake this for anything great, but it's good at what it does.

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