Tweet
Smile: the creepiest poster I've put up in a long time and the scariest movie I've played in quite a while.
Smile is about a sort of contagious hallucination where those who have it kill themselves and the hallucination passes on to whoever is near them at that time. The movie revolves around a psychiatrist who initially tries to treat one of these people and who then inherits the hallucination herself. The contrast between her attitude toward this at the start of the movie ("It's a manifestation of stress and it's not real") and her attempts to convince everyone that it really is real later on ("I'm not crazy!") makes this quite interesting and the whole thing is creepy as anything.
There are several jump scares, a few of which strike me as a bit lazy, but it also manages to crank up the stress level over the course of the movie and by the end it's a real pressure cooker.
Most of the audience for this movie (around here) is teenage girls. Last night was the biggest night I've had for it so far (a Sunday?) and three of them got scared out after about 45 minutes and left. A few of the others came out into the lobby for a while to decompress and I heard one of the girls crying in the bathroom, though she eventually came out and went back in to watch the rest of the movie. A friend of mine, one of the few adults here last night, walked past me at the end of the show and said, "That was really disturbing."
The filmmakers made a scary movie. And succeeded.
Smile is about a sort of contagious hallucination where those who have it kill themselves and the hallucination passes on to whoever is near them at that time. The movie revolves around a psychiatrist who initially tries to treat one of these people and who then inherits the hallucination herself. The contrast between her attitude toward this at the start of the movie ("It's a manifestation of stress and it's not real") and her attempts to convince everyone that it really is real later on ("I'm not crazy!") makes this quite interesting and the whole thing is creepy as anything.
There are several jump scares, a few of which strike me as a bit lazy, but it also manages to crank up the stress level over the course of the movie and by the end it's a real pressure cooker.
Most of the audience for this movie (around here) is teenage girls. Last night was the biggest night I've had for it so far (a Sunday?) and three of them got scared out after about 45 minutes and left. A few of the others came out into the lobby for a while to decompress and I heard one of the girls crying in the bathroom, though she eventually came out and went back in to watch the rest of the movie. A friend of mine, one of the few adults here last night, walked past me at the end of the show and said, "That was really disturbing."
The filmmakers made a scary movie. And succeeded.