Winging its way to the home formats following a huge box-office bow ($216 million in worldwide takings), Smile is a deeply unsettling horror, full of your usual jump scares you’d expect from a high-profile studio chiller, but Parker Finn’s feature debut cuts so much deeper.
Sosie Bacon leads the cast of the film as Dr. Rose Cotter, a therapist in a psychiatric ward who witnesses a horrifying incident involving one of her patients. Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) witnessed the suicide of her history professor just days earlier and has been traumatised ever since. She sees a vision of a smiling person, an entity that keeps telling her that she is going to die. Moments later, Laura slits her own throat before Rose and dies in the psychiatric ward under her care.
Devasted by the incident, Rose starts to see visions of her own, the curse seemingly passed on from her former patient, the young doctor’s fate seemingly in the hands of the unseen entity. Will she succumb to the curse, too?
Kat reviewed this film in depth theatrically in much more detail, and I have to agree with a lot of what she said. This is definitely not an easy watch, but fans of the genre will lap up Parker Finn’s unsettling tale in their droves. It’s more slow-burning than I initially expected, but the clearly talented Finn offers up enough jump scares throughout to grab your attention if your mind does start to wander.
Stasey reprises her role as Laura from the 2020 short (also included on the disc), and there are further, superb performances from the likes of Jesse T. Usher, the brilliant Rob Morgan, and Kal Penn, but it is Bacon who warrants the most praise, her performance as Rose utterly convincing and deeply affecting. The true star of the piece, though, is Parker Finn, the film a massive calling card for a major new talent in the genre.
The disc is loaded with bonus materials, a nice package from the folks at Paramount. As well as the original short, there are decent behind-the-scenes featurettes, specifically, the near-30-minute ‘Something’s Wrong with Rose: Making Smile’, and the wonderful feature-length audio commentary from writer/ director Finn, who offers up oodles of insight into the production and history of his story. ‘Flies on the Wall: Inside the Score’ offers an eight-minute look at the audio of the movie, specifically the music, as the title suggests, while there are also two deleted scenes. Both have the option of a Finn commentary to explain their exclusion from the final film.
In all, a great package from Paramount and a worthy addition to any horror completist’s home collection.
Smile now is available to Download & Keep and on 4K Ultra HD™, Blu-ray™, and DVD.
Smile
Summary
A superbly crafted horror from an exceptional new talent and a bonus-packed Blu-ray to match.
