Smile tickles the brain and terrifies without remorse

polygon.com:

Polygon is on the ground at the 2022 Fantastic Fest, reporting on new horror, sci-fi, and action movies making their way to theaters and streaming. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere.

Parker Finn’s debut horror movie Smileis carefully calibrated to do different things to different viewers. To someone who isn’t well versed in horror, it’s an efficient and effective scare-fest, full of big, startling scares and freaky, grinding tension.

But it works entirely differently for a savvy horror crowd who can recognize the ways Finn iterates on other popular horror movies, and predict from the start where the story is bound to go. Smile often winks at the audience, offering up a silent You know what comes next, right? You can see how bad this could get, can’t you? It’s easy to see at any moment what Finn is doing with his characters, and where he’s aiming the story — and that seems to be entirely deliberate. Even so, it’s never easy to shrug off the impact when the promised horrors arrive.

Working from a previous short film, 2020’s Laura Hasn’t Slept, Finn’s script takes almost no time to establish who his protagonist is before her world starts falling apart. Working in a hospital’s emergency psychiatric ward, therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is used to seeing people in crisis, and talking them down. Then she encounters a badly shaken patient who claims she’s haunted by some sort of malevolent entity no one else can see, a creature with a horrifying smile who torments her by appearing in the guise of people she knows.

The story sounds like a paranoid delusion — and when Rose tries to talk to other people about the shape-changing, invisible, malevolent curse-creature, she sounds