Written and directed by Parker Finn
Starring Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Kal Penn and Rob Morgan
USA, 2022
This Horrorfest is making me realize what a broken record I am -- yet again, here's a modern movie where I saw the trailer and dismissed it as looking stupid, only later to hear it was actually good, give it a chance, and realize my initial assessment was totally wrong.
On one hand I'd rather be wrong than right in this case -- if only every movie was good, what a world that would be. On the other what's wrong with me that I keep assuming things suck and then find out later they don't? I guess I am a pessimist, after all. That's depressing.
This time around we've got a horror entity that's passed from one person to the other, forcing its current "host" (I guess you could say) to eventually kill themselves. Whoever sees them kill themselves inherits the entity and continues on. The entity makes itself known by causing visions of people with ghastly unwavering grins. But the smile is really a red herring -- the reason I assumed the movie would be dumb is because I assumed it would literally 100% rely on the creepiness of weird smiles for all the scares. Instead, this is just a mere symptom of a bigger problem where the afflicted cannot be sure what is real, what is fake, and commits atrocities without even really knowing it, as in a scene where a seemingly totally normal, if sleep deprived, therapist (Sosie Bacon) gives a grisly gift to her little nephew for his birthday.
The great thing about this movie is that therapist begins to lose it, everyone becomes appropriately concerned for her well being in a real-world kind of way. They don't go looking for a supernatural medium or anything like that, they just assume she has psychological problems and needs help. This drives her crazy because she know there's something evil going on. Even when she amasses a bunch of evidence in the form of a string of mysteriously connected suicides, documented in police files, which she waves desperately in her friends and family's faces, rather than going, "Oh there might be something here" the other characters say stuff like, "I don't think I can have you around my family right now" which is a totally reasonable thing to say.
Another nice thing about this movie is how quickly it gets to the meat of the problem with the main character. We don't really get a half hour of set up in the same way that we do in other similar movies. There is definitely set up and character development and pay off and all that good stuff, but it moves fairly quickly into the supernatural story line without a lot of build up, so it's almost as if we don't really get to know the "normal" therapist before she goes "crazy," which is a fun choice because then you're kind of locked into an unreliable narrator's perspective, and sympathetic to the other characters around her -- even though you know something supernatural is going on!
I guess the biggest weakness of the movie might be the ending, but the rest of the movie leading up to it is so satisfying that it doesn't even really matter. It has become pretty standard these days that whatever evil is plaguing characters of modern horror movies probably will end up being somehow intrinsically connected to their own past trauma, usually involving a dead parent or family member of some kind, so this kind of ending is not totally satisfying because it is totally expected, and the rest of the movie is not quite as obvious.
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