Smile (2022)......Somewhere in the overlength of this film, there's a quick, nasty and creepy 85 minute movie struggling to get out.......
Main problem......the 85 minute little nasty tale is welded into the body of a film that clocks in at close to 2 hours......and in no way is there enough story here to support that running time....
But then that's the delusions-of-grandeur affliction infecting almost every new film that opens these days.....they're anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes too damn long.
At 85 minutes, I might have really loved "Smile". At 115 minutes, it's.....kinda okay.....until you start to notice how much it's wearing out its welcome.
So what we've got here is an old horror reliable - the chain reaction curse that travels from person to person....like COVID in slow motion. An unseen paranormal entity tortures its victims with visions of people grinning like William Castle's 'Mr. Sardonicus'...(look that one up). The poor sucker targeted by...uh... Mr. Smiley then commits suicide in front of somebody else....passing along Mr. Smiley to that unfortunate witness and starting the whole process over again.
Our current tormented soul is hospital shrink Dr. Rose Cotter (Susie Bacon). To the doc's everlasting misery, she watched a young girl, Smiley's latest prey, go horribly bye-bye-bye. And in the movie's mythology, that makes the good doctor fresh Smiley-bait. And it doesn't help that she's already burdened with unnerving childhood memories of her mentally ill mother, a suicide.
The rest of the movie? A long, long, long, long slog but quite an acting showcase for Susie Bacon. She spends the entire film in a state of ever increasing hysteria and mental deterioration as Smiley chips away at her sanity.
Smiley, befitting the creature's obsession with evil grins, must consider itself a prankster, sometimes manifesting itself as the doc's friends and family.....and pulling a really sick joke on her while attending her little nephew's birthday party.
But though the film does drag on and on to test the limits of a viewer's patience, the filmmakers do know how to whip up some nightmarish visuals. And when it comes to the finale, they don't skimp or even worse, go artsy-smartsy. To paraphrase Stephen King (from his book Danse Macabre' sooner or later you gotta go booga-booga....and writer-director Parker Finn, I'm happy to report, took that sage advice to heart.
The film's climactic reveal of Smiley in all its gooey, gruesome glory, gives you the full booga-booga with relish..... and.at the very least made me feel like I didn't waste my time watching it.
Wish I could rate it higher, but the unnecessary padding will hold it at 3 stars (***). Memo to Hollywood - Stop with the bloated "Lawrence Of Arabia" running times and start cutting films to tell your stories in that actual real time it takes to tell them.......yours truly, BQ.
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