If you’ve ever had this word addressed to you as an instruction, followed up with “… it may never happen!” you already know how grotesquely unnatural smiling is if you don’t feel like it. It’s much more difficult than pouting when you’re happy, a skull-grimace of misery, betraying the heartbreak within. Incidentally, I lost a bet with myself as to which Nat King Cole song would be ironically played over this film’s closing credits.
Smile is a queasy, nasty horror-melodrama from first time feature director Parker Finn. Like David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows, this takes an indirect inspiration from the MR James short story Casting the Runes, all about an unending DNA-replication of evil. It’s shot in a dull, blank, subdued light into which hallucinations and supernatural incursions can insinuate themselves without warning, together with unsubtly brutal but effective jump scares.
