Humax TV Tonight: Smile

Smile premieres on Channel 4 tonight at 9.20pm.

Watch, record or stream it with a Humax set-top box.

Smiling makes you feel better. It releases endorphins – lifting your mood and chilling you out. Please writer and director Parker Finn, don’t ruin smiling by making a self-slasher horror movie about it, starring Sosie Bacon. Oh, you have.

A young girl finds her mum dead by suicide. This little girl grows up to be Dr Rose Cotter (Bacon), a psychiatrist specialising in – and not profiting much from – helping traumatised people. Physician, heal thyself! In her professional capacity, Rose meets PhD student Laura (Caitlin Stasey). Weeks earlier, Laura witnessed a college professor bludgeon himself to death with a hammer. Since that – obviously – traumatic event, Laura has sensed a presence that ‘looks like people but isn’t a person.’

Then she unblinkingly slits her own throat with a preternaturally large grin on her face right in front of Rose. That’s when Rose’s hallucinations begin. But are the hallucinations a result of the trauma of this event? Or a triggering of the emotions of the little girl who found her mother dead? Or is there a malevolent presence that feeds on survivors’ guilt? Her fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) fears it may be a mixture of the former, and perhaps a little bit of inherited mental illness.

But her ex Joel (Kyle Gallner) – who’s a cop – believes her about the latter and resolves to help her solve the mystery.