Smile has plenty of wild scares and amazing acting carrying it through most of it's runtime but once it got to it's final act, it lost steam. While the movie was already riding the wave of the "curse" trope like The Ring, The Grudge, It Follows etc., it also had the "trauma" trope added into it that's usually found in your standard A24 movie (it also adds all the same camera movements seen in an Ari Aster film). The trauma aspect added some momentum to the character and gave some explanation to why people may think she's crazy, but it didn't do much for me. It just made the movie feel way more derivative by the end. In my opinion, the ending also felt very anticlimactic. The characters talk about how you need to kill someone to end the curse and they briefly show something that alludes to that but nothing is ever really done with it. Instead, they end it with the main character taking her life whilst smiling. As I said, it left me feeling kinda empty and upset that they didn't do more with the concept. Overall, it was a serviceable horror movie that I don't regret seeing.
C+
C+