After a woman takes her own life in front of a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist starts hallucinating. She’s not sure if she’s going crazy or if there is something supernatural that is out to kill her.
I love It Follows (2014), and Smile is a copy of It Follows. But it is not as good as It Follows. It does not have the same atmosphere, and it lacks the most intense scenes we witnessed in It Follows.
The script isn’t the best. We follow a woman who is a psychiatrist, and her life is turned upside down when a patient kills herself in front of her with a big smile. It turns out that there may be something supernatural going on since there’s a connection between people who committed suicide in a short timeframe. Now she’s trying to find the answer to what the hell is going on. She’s seeing things that aren’t real, and her colleagues and friends are sure she needs help and that she may be dangerous to herself and other people.
The movie is too long with a runtime of 115 minutes. Smile should have been 25 minutes shorter. The script never fills up the runtime with enough content. And I never cared about the protagonist. The movie tries to make her human with the things she experienced in her childhood, but I never felt my heart cared for her. The actress is at least good and believable, but the other characters around her are bland. They are empty and generic.
The ending is weak. It lacks a real punch to the stomach. It also steals a scene from It Follows, and it does not care. Smile tries to be dramatic and intense in the last 10 minutes, but all I could think of was It Follows.
If you haven’t watched It Follows, I guess you will appreciate Smile more than I did. But since I have seen It Follows, and I love the movie, except for the ending, I never felt the magic in Smile since it is a copycat who tries to hide it is a copy machine with a pretty lackluster story of childhood and trauma.