Smile

 Smile begins with a shot that artfully zooms out from a dead woman's face, through a bedroom riddled with pills (subtle, it ain't), to a terrified little girl standing at the doorway.

 She grows up to be Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), an idealistic doctor working at the psych ward of a big hospital. Her latest patient is a PhD student who's experiencing some severe paranoid delusions: ever since one of her teachers bludgeoned himself to death in front of her with a hammer, she insists, a presence has been haunting her. Rose tries to calm her, but her patient ends up slitting her throat with a vase shard, all the while smiling like a lunatic.
 As staff rush in to handle the situation, the camera zooms in to Rose's face, into one of her eyes, and there, in the blackness of the pupil, we get to the film's title card, pulsing nastily. It's in her head!
 That's one hell of a way to start a movie.

 Rose is understandably rattled by the incident. Soon, she starts seeing the suicide girl in random places, smiling at her... and then nastier things start happening. With the help of an ex-flame who happens to be a cop with conveniently shaky ethics, she finds out that this cycle - people killing themselves in front of a witness, who then go on to kill themselves in front of someone else - has been going on for a while.
 It's a cool premise, but also pretty derivative (beginning with its J-Horror premise by way of It Follows, and then running through a glut of modern horror clichés). That's ok, though; It wears its borrowed elements with flair. I was more bothered by the way the script (by director Parker Finn) oversells its message as the film goes on.

 It's not 'elevated horror' fatigue - I don't see any reason to question the movie's legitimacy just because it's explicitly about trauma. And I tend to like elevated horror anyhow. The whole psychological angle here is intrinsically tied to the supernatural menace, and it makes sense.
 What put me off is the way that it goes overboard trying to convey the film's simple thesis, which necessitates making most of the secondary characters unempathetic, unlikeable shits, and contriving situations that make Rose look like a complete nutter. That whole situation is... well, yeah, it's the point of the movie, but it just doesn't appeal to me narratively. I also felt it spoils what starts as a very good performance by Bacon by making her go a bit strident. But more than anything some of the themes feel too on-the-nose, too belabored.

  Other than that, Smile's got a lot going for it: one hell of a recurring, thematically appropriate motif (forced smiles, of the sort that pretend everything is all right), good kills, a pretty cool monster, some great gore, effective jump scares, and a pervasive sense of dread. It's nasty, unsparing, and you can tell everyone involved put a lot of thought and care on it. Technically, aside of a couple of iffy effects, it's extremely well shot and crafted. It doesn't have a huge amount of personality, but there are a lot of carefully planned shots and camera moves, and the use of negative space -at some points echoing earlier events- is excellent.
 It's another movie that makes me kind of feel bad for not liking it more; It may get lost in a glut of similar movies, which perhaps is deserved, but it'd be a shame; this is a seriously impressive debut film.