Review: Terrifying "SMILE" Will Knock That... Smile Off Your Face

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 76 of 2022 (No. 1888) by Leroy Douresseaux

Smile (2022)

Running time:  116 minutes (1 hour, 56 minutes)

MPA – R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language

WRITER/DIRECTOR:  Parker Finn

PRODUCERS:  Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, and Robert Salerno

CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Charlie Sarroff

EDITOR: Elliot Greenberg

COMPOSER: Cristobal Tapia de Veer

HORROR

Starring:  Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan, Gillian Zinser, Nick Arapoglou, Matthew Lamb, and Dora Kiss

Smile is a 2022 psychological horror film from writer-director Parker Finn, his debut feature film.  Finn based Smile on his 2020 horror short film, Laura Hasn't Slept.  Smile focuses on a psychiatrist who starts having terrifying experiences and witnessing a young woman's bizarre suicide.

Smile introduces Dr. Rose Carter (Sosie Bacon), a clinical psychiatrist.  While working at a psychiatric ward, Rose meets a new patient, a very frightened young woman named Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey).  Laura believes that she is cursed because days earlier, she witnessed her art history professor, Gabriel Munoz, die by suicide – using a hammer to bludgeon himself to death.  Now, Laura claims that an entity, which takes the form of smiling people, is haunting her and telling her that she is going to die.  Laura says that it is the same smile that she saw on Munoz's face before he killed himself.

After her encounter with Laura, Rose has a series of bizarre experiences, including one with a troubled patient in the psychiatric ward and another at her nephew's birthday party.  Is Rose's own traumatic past manifesting itself as an entity that vexes her mind and dreams?  Or is some entity haunting her to a gruesome death?

Smile is not the first film to use childhood trauma and the subsequent adult grief and guilt as devices to scare audiences.  [One is 2005's Boogeyman, which is not nearly as scary or as good as Smile.]  Parker Finn plays fast and loose with the genre and is rather tricky.  He makes Dr. Rose Cotter an unreliable narrator, one reason being that she should recognize her symptoms.  Rose has trouble distinguishing between delusions and reality.  Are her troubles a result of a job that exposes her to people with problems, or are her troubles really the result of a curse?  Finn's screenplay keeps us wondering about the truth and about the validity of the curse.

Sometime, the film is rather clear that Rose is cursed and that everything else is just to confuse … and scare the viewer.  And I was scared.  Smile is genuinely scary and, at times, terrifying, and Sosie Bacon gives a strong performance as Dr. Rose Cotter, a character that is obviously troubled and traumatized.

The one thing that keeps Smile from being great is the ending, not because of its variations, but because Finn practically telegraphs it halfway through the film.  Although I wouldn't say that Smile is a copy of the buzzed about horror film, It Follows (2014), but Smile follows... it.  I have no problem recommending Smile to viewers that want to be scared out of their wits by a horror movie, but don't want a high body count.  Smile is a really good horror movie – creepy but not slash-film violent.

7 of 10

A-

★★★½ out of 4 stars

Friday, December 23, 2022

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Review: "THX 1138 Director's Cut" is a New Look at Early George Lucas

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 188 (of 2004) by Leroy Douresseaux

THX 1138 – The George Lucas Director’s Cut (2004)
Originally released as THX 1138 (1971)
Running time: 88 minutes
MPAA – R for some sexuality/nudity (Director’s Cut)
EDITOR/DIRECTOR: George Lucas
WRITERS: Walter Murch and George Lucas; from a story by George Lucas (based upon his screenplay for the short film)
PRODUCERS: Lawrence Sturhahn
CINEMATOGRAPHERS: Albert Kihn and David Meyers

SCI-FI

Starring: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Don Pedro Colley, and Maggie McOmie

THX 1138 was filmmaker George Lucas’s first feature length film, and he based it upon a short film he made while in film school, THX 1138:4EB. The film is set in a 25th-century totalitarian state that has stripped mankind of any individuality. People are numbered drones who are encouraged to work hard, be safe, watch out for their fellow workers, and consume. The state religion is a kind of therapy in which pre-recorded voices push mantras about “the masses.” There is a government-enforced program that uses sedating drugs to control the populace. The state is always watching people through cameras and monitors, and when a citizen opens his medicine cabinet, a voice suggests which drugs he should take. To not take drugs earns a citizen immediate notice and is a serious crime.

When the title character, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall), stops taking the mind-numbing drugs, he irrevocably changes his life. He has sex with his mate (who is more like a platonic roommate), LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie), and sexual intercourse is a felony. After LUH 3417 is impregnated by their intercourse, the couple is throne in prison, and THX, his mind clear now that he is drug free, looks to escape the system.

THX 1138 was originally released in 1971, but in September of 2004, THX 1138 – The George Lucas Director’s Cut was re-released theatrically in a small number of cities (reportedly 20), and that re-release is the subject of this review. While some may consider the film’s look and the way it delivers it themes to be dated, the film is actually timeless. Political states ostensibly exist to protect the populace, but they do so mostly by controlling some or all aspects of citizens’ lives. An ideal situation is that the state interferes as little as possible, if at all, but the truth of that matter is that many states grow more controlling as they grow older, or if some disaster, man made or natural, causes so much havoc and destruction, that the state has to take total control to bring things back to some state of normalcy.

Lucas makes all of this feel real; the drama is palatable, and the fear of retribution from the state is a threat even the audience can feel. The threat of punishment from authority and the portrayal of an omnipresent society in which privacy is almost nonexistence is chilling. The film’s lone flaw, a serious one, is that it seems alternately too dry and too cold. The ideas behind the story, the production values, and the atmosphere are dead on, but the execution is often flat. The almost symbolic ending precariously straddles the fence of being appropriate or clumsy. Still, for lovers of that sci-fi sub-genre, dystopian futures, this is a good bet.

6 of 10
B

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