Smile

 I travelled to Sarawak, for reasons I'll find time to elaborate in other posts. But I had free time to kill and I decided to watch Smile, a horror movie I've heard raved and praised for its uniqueness. So I checked the timeslot at The Spring in Kuching and found one about two hours later and bought it without hesitating too much as I knew hesitation and unnecessary deliberation had not been proved helpful most of the time. By the way, though MBO in Spring gave me bad impressions, this time GSC seemed to have improved it.

Anyway I went for the 7.15pm screen but was shopping at Parkson shortly before. I went to the counter and paid for what I wanted at about 7.05pm and thought it would be timely then to enter the hall, but I did not anticipate transaction errors the counter might face. It caused me a delay and by 7.20pm I said I couldn't wait anymore and left - the only problem they had was the inability to print the receipt for me. The product could still be paid for and was successfully paid for. I thus left.

I entered the hall late about 7.25pm and thought the trailers would run for 15 minutes, but I was slightly wrong - it had begun, but judging from the looks of it, only for about a few minutes. Anyway, the hall was pretty empty. And I think due to my rush, I was a little clumsy and noisy and disruptive, especially when I on the torch in my phone to find my seat in an otherwise dark room that was suitable for the genre.

Anyway, to the movie.

It was good, but it wasn't 'smiley' enough. The theme of the movie is about an evil entity that smiles. That's it, but 99.5% of the movies involve no smiling. The main character saw a person smiling at her and then slit her own throat, and she thus is haunted by a ghost that no one else can see. That's the gist of it, and she began her homework to find the root of the evil.

Okay, the movie had tonnes of jumpscares. It relies on psychological tricks and appropriately-timed jumpscares to keep the movie alive - and it worked. It scared the shit out of many people. I was in the hall and many people were screaming, some actually tried to leave the hall. I saw a guy standing by the door, not sure whether he had wanted to go for the loo and decided to stay a little to watch what was going to happen or that he was just scared and wanted to go. 

But the jumpscares worked. It reminded me of the movie Oculus, about an evil mirror that curses the beholders. Movies that deploy psychological trickery, if masterfully crafted, could enthrall viewers in manners others genres could not. And Smiles did - a few jumpscares really worked, and it really made the movie a lot more interesting rather than dulling it by repeating what the viewers could have foreseen.

Though, I must add, for the jumpscares to work, you probably do not want to watch the trailers first. I watched the trailers and found how revealing they were and am glad I did not watch it before the movie.

Overall, I give it a 9/10. One of the finest horror movies recently. Horror movies have been on the decline, especially since J-horror and Thai horror had appeared to cease, and quality horror movies had all but came to a screeching halt other than the Conjuring. Smile is a welcome return of the horror genre.