115 min | R | September 30, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
A psychiatrist watches a patient die smiling, and then the smiling thing starts following her. It wears the faces of everyone she trusts. The dread is genuine. The metaphor is louder than it needs to be.
Rose Cotter is a psychiatrist who watches a patient die in front of her, smiling, just before the smiling thing crawls into Rose’s own life. Parker Finn builds the film around a curse that passes from one witness to the next through a single act of seeing a violent death. The premise is a metaphor for trauma. The thing that hunts Rose wears the faces of the people around her, and it grins while it does it. The film is really about how trauma isolates you and how the people who should believe you decide you are the problem instead.
Sosie Bacon plays Rose as a woman coming apart in real time. She starts composed and clinical and ends raw and unbelieved, and Bacon tracks every step of the collapse without rushing it. Kyle Gallner plays Joel, the ex-cop ex-boyfriend who becomes the one person willing to investigate the pattern, and he grounds the film with weary decency. Jessie T. Usher plays Trevor, the fiance who responds to Rose’s unraveling with irritation rather than fear, and the casual cruelty of that reaction lands. Robin Weigert plays Dr. Madeline Northcott, Rose’s own therapist, with the soft condescension of a professional who has already decided what is wrong with her.
Finn writes and directs his first feature with a precise sense of where to put the camera. He shoots inverted angles and slow overhead drifts that make ordinary rooms feel wrong before anything happens in them. The score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer warps familiar sounds into low menace and refuses to give the audience clean release. Finn frames the smiles in long held shots that dare you to keep looking. The production design keeps Rose’s house clean and bright, which makes the dread feel like it is leaking in from somewhere it should not reach.
The film knows exactly what it is doing on a technical level and stages its scares with real control. The problem is that the trauma metaphor announces itself early and then keeps explaining itself. Rose’s investigation follows a familiar path of dead ends and exposition that horror has walked many times before. Finn has the craft to terrify and the discipline to sustain dread, and he has not yet found a story that surprises as much as it unsettles.