Summary
After seeing bizarre incidents and injuries involving patients, Dr. Rose Cotter began to experience horrific incidents that she could not explain. Rose has to face her difficult past to survive and escape her horrible new reality.
I thought was humorously named Mount Pleasant now one day Rose gets a patient who's clearly terrified and then acts out bringing about horror for Rose now the story itself is fairly predictable I mean even if you haven't seen the trailers The Arc of events are very self-explanatory and the movie doesn't really hide too much of it or even obscure what's going on but the anxious tension and the scares come from what plays out in front of our eyes there's an ongoing theme of mental health within the story and I love that while psychosis and mental instability are visualized for us within character actions those that deal with the issues they're not made fun of or used as punch lines the behaviors are used to amp up the stress in the unease but if a character makes an off-color joke about mental health that's usually followed up with a retort or a look to Showcase how inappropriate that joke actually was there are so many scenes within this that start off by making us jittery and then end with us typically jumping in our seats I mean yeah there are some jump scares within the presentation but honestly they didn't feel cheap these were the sort that just kind of appear within a camera movement or in the background the music will ramp up to a stinger usually providing that extra oomph that scares but I mean seriously several times when I jumped I then laughed out loud because of how impressive the scene was or maybe I just needed to relieve some of the anxiety we saw this in a packed theater and the reactions were awesome as a collective experience we jump shout wince and then laugh I mean in each of those emotive outbursts they were earned now I'm sure there are going to be some comparisons to a few movies because while this presentation is new the storyline it's fairly familiar and I can see this being compared with with a Japanese horror from 1998 or even an American Horror from 2014 and they each share similar elements and just like those two films smile is effective in capturing the dread now in addition to soci bacon we get some great performances from Jessie T Usher Kyle gallner Robin weigert Cal pin and Rob Morgan and each gets different moments to draw out personality quirks that typically lead to very unsettling interactions I think my favorite though out of The Supporting Cast was Robin wieger she has a few quieter moments with Bacon's Rose where we can feel this mounting apprehension and bacon then really creates a convincing character Rose is grounded but she's traumatized which helps to keep her on edge and we watch her personality morph as time progresses she's deteriorating mentally just due to the stress that she's experiencing and there are little physical quirks that she adds to the character that make her all the more real she'll incessantly bite her nails or even just wipe her face with her hands I mean sometimes to get something off but mostly just as a nervous tick that says a ton without using any words the cinematography is awesome too a few times Dutch angles are used where the camera twists into this odd angle that's meant to put us ill at ease but the shots that I found the most unsettling were exterior Aerials where a vehicle would be shown driving along a road and then as it passed the camera would continue just to rotate until that horizon line had flipped so that made the ground the sky and then vice versa and the visual was beautiful but it really did mess with my head and then there are the effects that come into play most are practical in nature and they look super convincing now there's a reveal in the final act that has some wildly upsetting visuals and I loved how it made my skin crawl now some of these in that final Act were cgi'd but they still looked creepy and they added another layer of odd to the story now I was surprised that this was just short of two hours normally in a horror they are a little shorter and I didn't really mind the time in this but there was one point around the middle where I did wonder how much time was left and I think that's just because the story had hit a lull and I was noticing the length but the movie finishes out really strong with a driving urgency thanks in part to an impending time limit that's inherent to the story and this quickens the pace and it makes for a very exciting conclusion but that being said it is a very predictable ending I mean just like the majority of the film and even though I mostly knew where this was headed and then I certainly could guess the finale I was still crazy invested and was very very tense through the entire thing now when we walked out my arms legs and butt were a little fatigued from all the clinching which to me marks the effectiveness of the overall execution now the story may be predictable but it did exactly what it set out to do scare me thrill me and then keep me entertained so overall smile is a freaky look at trauma using the vehicle of mental health to drive the narrative while there are several jump scares they're used effectively to unsettle and unseat without feeling cheap or unearned Sophie bacon is wonderful at capturing a character who mentally declines as she questions her reality and while the story feels a tiny bit long and the whole project is predictable the final...