Smile is the kind of horror movie that works mostly for intangible elements that it brings to the table. The music is creepy. The scares hit at the right times. The acting is pretty credible. There is good creepiness throughout the movie, and it builds pretty well.
What the movie lacks is originality. The plot involves a psychiatrist, Rose, whose patient tells her about being stalked by an unknown entity who is always smiling at her. This eventually drives the woman crazy, and she commits suicide in front of Rose. Now Rose is being haunted and stalked by the same entity that was terrorizing her patient. What she finds is a pattern, where the person who recently committed suicide witnessed a person committing suicide and then goes crazy that goes back to twenty different people. This sort of thing has been done and done again—a curse that keeps being passed from person to person involving an evil entity that must be broken.
So, the movie doesn’t score points for originality, not just in the premise, but within the movie, where it was easy to predict what was going to happen next. Still, it had enough good horror within it to be an enjoyable movie that will make you smile—pun fully intended.
