This weekend, Paramount’s latest horror movie topped the US box office, with fans calling it “genuinely terrifying”. We’ve seen the guerrilla marketing campaign, but what is the movie actually about?
Based on a 2020 short film — Laura Hasn’t Slept —Smile’s protagonist is Dr Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist who witnesses one of her patients take her own life. But the strange circumstances of it — the patient grins at her before slitting her throat — lead Rose to believe that the smile is, in fact, a chain reaction curse, and by witnessing it, grave and terrifying things happen to you. Needless to say shit soon starts to hit the fan in Rose’s life too.
The movie, according to critics, is a little “derivative”, comparing it to It Follows and The Ring. But, in an era of horror that’s aiming for under-your-skin psychological damage over fun jump scares, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The ReelView critic James Berardinelli pointed out that this movie is “for those who appreciate true horror (as opposed to the more palatable version that has supplanted it over the years)”. And Flicks writer Daniel Rutledge called it “a dark, bloody scary horror that has left a big grin on my face.”
Oftentimes, fans and critics don’t agree on movies; just look at the critic and audience scores for Don’t Worry Darling on Rotten Tomatoes. But everybody seems to have something good to say about Smile, despite the comments that it’s formulaic. Boasting an 81% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, a user named Javier called it the “Best horror movie of the year” and Ikey said he “SCREAMED AT LEAST 10 TIMES. I’m a grown ass man.” And my personal favourite from lilcuhpcakez: “Man I don’t even want anyone to smile at me for a while [it] had me F up after now ima sleep with the lights on and [watching] cartoons tonight lol great movie n had me jumping!!” they said. Spill!!!
On Twitter, too, reactions are spilling in, with some giving it 10/10 and others calling it “a masterpiece”.
Paramount will obviously be glad that the response is so strong: they had originally planned to forgo a big screen release and drop the movie on Paramount+ earlier this year, but after test screenings came back extremely positive, they organised a theatre run for it instead. The film’s small budget — just $17 million — was recouped and then some on its first weekend, earning $22 million in the US alone. That makes it the highest grossing debut for a release in September 2022, above Don’t Worry Darling. Sorry to Miss Flo.
Perhaps that marketing campaign really worked. If you didn’t catch it, at MLB (that’s Major League Baseball) games, Paramount bought seats in the sightline of the cameras broadcasting the match nationwide. Actors stood up in their seats and grinned menacingly into the camera wearing Smile merch.
So there we have it! It looks like old school horror movies are back in a very big way. Smile is in theatres globally now.