I’m sure you’ve heard or seen trailers and advertisements for the new psychological horror film “Smile.” Maybe you have seen the teasers in theaters or seen people smiling in the background of sports games to promote the movie. 

The film follows a young therapist, who, after tragically witnessing the death of one of her patients, gets possessed by the “Smile,” haunting her for the rest of the film. I walked into this film expecting an average horror film with bad jumpscares and a lackluster plot. I was right. There was nothing special about this film. It was a culmination of an unoriginal plot, poor jumpscares and bad acting. 

When I first heard of this film, the idea of “Smile”  seemed exciting, unique and intriguing. However, the actual plot leaves more to be desired. The possessive curse that’s only passed along via a crazy circumstance is anything but original, and frankly, boring. Although the simplicity of the horror plot is quite interesting, the execution of this curse throughout the film is poor and predictable, and overwhelmingly cliche. The ending of the movie also perfectly sets up a “Smile 2,” as if the producers were planning to make a lackluster movie for the money grab of a sequel. 

Although a ten-minute sequence at the end had me slightly scared, the rest of the movie was, simply put, a snooze-fest. The creators were mostly focused on building tension which they succeed in, but would break the tension by a glass falling or a phone ringing; nothing that ever involved a smile or supernatural activity. The jumpscare baiting occurred throughout the whole film until the third act, where the movie attempted to deploy multiple jumpscares with little success. “Smile” seemed to try and pull aspects from the popular horror film “Hereditary,” which built tension for almost an hour and a half, and then finally climaxed in the last thirty minutes. In “Smile,” though, the rising action just wasn’t the same. 

The cast in ”Smile” seemed to lack the acting chops to make it a convincing horror film. The lead actress, Sosie Bacon, was the only good actor on screen in my opinion, and even her performance was a tad unconvincing and bland at times. I will give her credit, though, as the writing didn’t necessarily contain moments that required emotional range.

This film was very plot-centric and didn’t pay enough attention to the development of its characters; a necessity for an effective horror film. These characters felt like pieces in a chess game: they served no meaningful purpose except to move the plot along.

Overall, this film failed to meet my expectations and was simply an average horror film. “Smile” had an unoriginal plot, poor horror aspects, bad acting and didn’t capitalize on character development, making it utterly conventional.