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Smile puts decent grin on a horror fan’s face

Let’s at least give thanks that an original piece of horror IP has shown up in our cinemas. For the past few years, pretty much everything I’ve seen at a cinema that could even laughingly be called a horror movie has been a sequel, a reboot, a prequel, or an American remake of a non-English-language original.

I was beginning to think that a new horror was something that only a streaming service would still take a punt on.

So, take a bow, Smile. No-one is here to say you’re the next big thing in horror, or even that you have anything fresh to say. But at least you are a new title, in a world full of spinoffs – and worse.

And that, mostly, is where the originality begins and ends. Smile is a pretty generic product, with enough DNA matches to The Ring and It Follows to establish a family tree that we could perhaps label one-good-idea, adequately executed.

The shtick in Smile is that there is a thing – an actual ancient curse, maybe – that dooms anyone who contracts it to die, usually by their own hand. And to pass the curse on, the victim will grin at you, in something like the terrifying and malevolent manner of a commercial radio DJ on an advertising billboard.

The first time that therapist Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, of 13 Reasons Why – and daughter of Kevin) sees the smile is on the face of a deeply traumatised patient, who tries to explain she is cursed. That session ends badly, but for Rose, the nightmare is just beginning. Bwahahaha, etc, etc.

But I reckon Smile does enough to justify a brief season on our big screens. First-time feature director Parker Finn is sure of his material – and it shows. The performances are uniformly strong; the camera work, which confidently favours long, steady takes, is better than the genre usually allows.

And the sound design is absolutely outstanding. Too often horrors rely on not much more than loud bangs and crashes to make us jump. What veteran Dan Kenyon assembles here is different and occasionally extraordinary.

If Smile had landed at about 20 minutes shorter – and shorn of an ‘‘explanation’’ that is as daft as it is pointless – then this could have been a classic to sit next to It Follows. But, even in this imperfect form, there was still enough going on in Smile to keep me, err, smiling.

Smile is now screening in cinemas nationwide.

Entertainment

en-nz

2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282119230422810

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