Smile

Cheap scares, a mechanism that is sound, and an ending that commits.

A psychiatrist watches a patient kill herself while smiling, and then begins to see people smiling at her.

The curse passes by witnessing: whoever sees the death carries it, and has about a week. That is a good engine because it means the protagonist cannot be helped, and every person she tells becomes an eventual candidate.

Parker Finn overuses the upside-down camera and the loud sting, and the film is roughly twenty minutes too long.

What earns it is Sosie Bacon, who plays somebody being systematically discredited, and a final act that refuses the escape the structure appears to be offering.

The birthday party sequence is nasty. The marketing, which put paid smilers in the crowd at televised baseball games, was better than the film.