Avis des critiques

“Smile’s” greatest asset is its relentless, oppressive grimness: This is a film where children and pets are as vulnerable as adults, and the horror elements are bloody and disturbing to match the dark themes. This unsparing sensibility is enhanced by Bacon’s shaky, vulnerable performance as Rose.

Though it may be derivative, Smile still manages to be a scary, unsettling ride that’s powered by an impressively committed Sosie Bacon performance and some assured direction. Finn is one to watch.

The premise to this sadistically effective horror is admittedly not an original one... But the combination of a committed central performance from the increasingly gaunt and haunted Bacon, and a jarring, tortured score, makes for an enjoyably nasty brush with the smiling face of evil.

Early on, the film is filled with plastered smiles, and Finn uses the motif in interesting ways. Then the inspiration vanishes and Smile settles into the wan, pro forma genre-flick form it so astutely evaded early on.

The winding storyline goes on probably a little too long, and the jump scares are, in a word, sadistic. But Bacon is great fun... and Finn is a pleasingly nervy stylist, letting the camera tilt and flip at seasick angles and ratcheting the tension as he goes. Smile is a pretty silly movie by any metric; still, it has teeth.

To its credit, [Smile] gets pretty close to riding the ideal line between jumpy spookfest and self-serious highbrow horror, and its streak of genuinely great built-for-a-crowd moments and gnarly imagery helps hoist this into positive territory. If nothing else, Smile is another signal that there could be a slow shift happening in studio horror for a potential new wave of idiosyncratic voices and ideas being ushered into the mainstream.

“Smile” is the kind of horror movie that earns the unique qualification of “genuinely scary." ... However shaky the supporting characters are... “Smile” is best when it’s more or less a one-woman show with Bacon, trapping us with the evolving fear, desperation, and newfound courage of Rose’s bizarre experience.

A relentlessly somber, precision-tooled picture whose frights only reinforce the wit of its premise, “Smile” turns our most recognizable sign of pleasure into a terrifying rictus of pain... [The film] doesn’t feel like a retread... and Bacon’s performance, both shaky and determined, ensures that the very real agony of mental illness and its stigmatization register as strongly as any supernatural pain.

[Finn's] made a scary movie that balances psychological shock therapy with old-fashioned fright, shadowy dread with blunt splatterfest FX, an artsy-fartsy sense of stylistics slapped on to a twisty B-movie scenario.

Smile [is] the latest example of how a single, effective image isn’t always enough to sustain a feature-length film... Considering every horror film these days seems to be “about trauma”, Smile suffers from never evolving past the basics – that trauma begets trauma and, if left unchecked and unexamined, can consume a person’s life. Can a horror film really build itself around a statement that obvious?

[Smile] is a movie that makes a few feeble gestures at sliding toward the so-called elevated variety of horror (like a couple upside-down shots that recall the vastly superior “Midsommar”). But there’s nothing in the film’s limp cinematography or flat atmospherics that suggest anything but cheap thrills.

Smile is a queasy, nasty horror-melodrama... shot in a dull, blank, subdued light into which hallucinations and supernatural incursions can insinuate themselves without warning, together with unsubtly brutal but effective jump scares.