Smile ★★★★☆

Smile dares to ask “What if It Follows had been good?”

If this film had been described in detail to me I probably would have thought it would sound terrible and going back and looking at the trailer now it does not look promising.

But it worked for me. Everything that in the trailer seems so trite gripped me in the moment while watching the full piece. It just all came together into a really tense and occasionally brutal movie.

My only real complaint is the fakeouts where we see the protagonist doing something that turns out to have been a dream or otherwise not real which I feel breaks the rules of how the visions of the smiler (I’m just going to call it that) otherwise work.