I waited a year after Smile started being advertised all over the streaming services to watch it because I was afraid I would have a bad time. Not because I thought it was going to be a stinker, just because I’m such a scaredy cat when it comes to modern, soul-destroying horror. Finally, last night, because I had booked a movie date night at home with my husband, and because he can never decide what to watch, I said, okay, we’ve been meaning to see this, let’s do it.

Synopsis: Sosie Bacon (yes, Kyra+Kevin) is Rose Cotter, a therapist or psychiatrist, I wasn’t sure which but she had a “Dr.” in front of her name. She’s working 80s hours a week in a hospital in a city that’s not named but there are Jersey license plates on the cars. Her boss is Kal Penn and he really needs to send her out for some White Castle, and she’s just about to go home and drink wine when one more call comes in. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s a PhD student who saw her boss kill himself with a hammer because a smiling hallucination demon made him do it and now it’s jumped into her just long enough to traumatize Rose by making her watch this patient kill herself.

But Rose was already fucked up by something in her childhood that she thinks is her fault (it’s not) and that makes all 20 million of the people who went and bought a ticket for this movie think it’s about trauma, which is the internet’s favorite word next to gaslight. Those people who like to put themselves through the mill when it comes to horror movies, shall we say. Man, I remember when a successful horror movie demon meant killing people the audience didn’t like with corny quips and Halloween haunted house attraction set pieces.

Yet still I was dumb enough to think this movie might be fun because it was popular, and then I turned it off right in the middle, right as Rose has been publicly humiliated by the demon and then abandoned by all two of the people who are supposed to love her, realized the demon has made her do one of the worst things imaginable to one of the least deserving people imaginable, and then delivered a heart-wrenching scream when she realizes she has suffered a tremendous injury after being jump scared once again by the demon. But then I thought about how much I liked Rose and wanted to see this damn depressing movie through to the end for her, because she didn’t deserve any of this. The nature of streaming services being what they are, it didn’t pick up where I stopped it, it made me watch her realize the extent of her injuries and then scream AGAIN, because the file always rewinds itself a few seconds.

Have you ever seen the British sitcom Black Books? The first season episode in which Bernard can’t remember why his best friends of many years pretend they don’t know him when they pass on the street after a drunken dinner party? And it turns out that Bernard got so drunk he thought the kitchen was the bathroom and he shit in a wicker chair in front of the couple’s small child? And then breaks his arm after confronting them the next night and has to have his arm set in a hilarious position and doesn’t have money for cab fare home? Yeah, what Rose does to a child at a party and the injury afterward are WAY worse than that, and there’s no laugh track.

Smile is embracing, nay, promoting a certain worldview which I don’t share, the one propagated by this very internet we sit on at this moment, the one that says no one cares about you and you shouldn’t care about them either because Caring Isn’t Sharing, Caring Is CRINGE! As soon as everything goes to hell for Rose, her fiance starts looking at her like she dared to call him on the phone instead of texting and he’s thinking “how embarrassing for you,” like you can imagine David from Schitt’s Creek coming in and doing a reaction face because Rose is possessed by a demon and probably has only a few days to live.

Rose’s aforementioned boss is kind of concerned, ditto for her therapist, but then again they might be hallucinations brought on by the demon. A couple of the people she goes to in order to try to find out what’s happening, you know the good old supernatural horror research road trip portion of the film, well they end up screaming in her face to get away from them. Only one person goes out of their way to help her, but he’s her ex-boyfriend who she dumped because she was catching feelings, and all he gets for his trouble is, well, spoilers. So he shouldn’t have tried to help, see? But apparently he’s in the sequel, Smile 2.

Nobody puts Rose on a psych hold and takes away the sharp objects, no one even changes her bandages and puts her to bed, and all this started because she worked too hard to help her patients. Don’t care about people, and definitely don’t work too many hours, because if your boss even notices you’re gone after he sends you on a leave of absence he will probably just peel his face off.

Sosie Bacon, though, what a performance. She’s the reason I put myself through the second half of this movie, and that’s saying something. Also, even though I didn’t care for the plot, even though I knew when the scares were being telegraphed, I still kept getting chills. I didn’t have any bad dreams though, thank God.

Can you tell I don’t know how to end this? How are you? Me, I got pain in my thumb from too much console gaming and had to switch to PC gaming, and I’m going to try out a new aerobics class today because the one I was going to had me waving my arms around too much and aggravating my carpal tunnel golf elbow, and I’m nervous. And I took the $20 annual deal on Peacock and I can’t stop binge watching old school Law and Order which is driving my husband Danny crazy and that’s why I set up a streaming movie date last night. Smile is on Paramount though, not Peacock, if you want to watch.