Smile · reception & legacy
2022 · Parker Finn
How Smile has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Written off by some in 2022 as another studio jump-scare machine, it became one of the decade's great horror sleeper hits — and when Smile 2 (2024) landed to even warmer reviews, the first film got retroactive credit as the foundation of an actually-good franchise.
What's debated
The forever-fight: is Smile a clever trauma-horror hit or the moment the 'trauma is the monster' metaphor officially wore out its welcome — with an It Follows-shaped asterisk hanging over the premise?
Its footprint
The marketing outlived the discourse: Paramount planted actors with frozen, unblinking grins behind home plate at televised MLB games, and the images went instantly viral — the 'Smile smiler' became a meme before most people saw the movie.
Where it stands
A crowd-pleaser more than a cinephile darling — a modern multiplex-horror touchstone that Letterboxd mostly rates 'pretty good,' then upgrades in hindsight for launching the series.
Named by the director
Influences Parker Finn has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.
- Cure (1997) — Finn has cited Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure as a key influence on Smile's creeping, contagion-like dread.
- Rosemary's Baby (1968) — Finn pointed to Polanski's paranoid, locked-to-one-woman's-perspective horror as a model for how Smile stays inside Rose's unraveling.
- Jacob's Ladder (1990) — Finn named it among the reality-bending psychological horrors that shaped Smile's is-this-really-happening texture.