Paramount+ Now Streaming Box Office Smash Critics Call “A scarier version of ‘The Ring'”
The Japanese horror film Ringu achieved success in its native Japan in 1998, captivating viewers with its eerie setup about a haunted videotape and the associated death curse. This led to an American remake in 2002, which quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Both incarnations are intense and frightening, with the original serving as the most effective for many.
Each film spawned a series of sequels and impostors in its wake. Both the sequel to the Japanese original and the American remake pale in comparison to their predecessor. Even so, additional entries followed, and similarly themed films continued to appear in the years thereafter. In 2022, a fledgling filmmaker called Parker Finn burst onto the scene with his brutal feature film directorial debut. A picture with a similar skeletal outline to The Ring, which pulled in more than $200 million at the box office.
Finn’s feature film directorial debut, Smile, like The Ring before it, is centered around a malevolent entity that will ultimately kill anyone exposed to it within a week. In both pictures, the protagonist must race to find answers before the clock runs out. Smile features enough nuance to keep it from reading as a shameless rehash of The Ring, but the similarities in the core narrative structure cannot be dismissed.
With all that said, I actually consider Smile the scarier of the two films. In fact, I went out on a limb a couple of years back and wrote an editorial arguing that very point. The headline of my coverage simply reads: “Smile Is a Scarier Version of The Ring.”
I went all in on that argument, saying, “Smile made me squirm even more than The Ring. The Ring is absolutely a frightening movie. And it certainly delivers a number of solid scares throughout its runtime. But The Ring has never gotten under my skin to the extent that Smile did.”
My write-up notes that the way that Smile frames its narrative around mental health adds an extra dose of unease to the setup. Finn taps into the way that mental health challenges can make a person feel like a prisoner in their own body. That, combined with the grimy hospital backdrop and liberal display of gore, really pushes this one over the edge as the scarier effort for me.
If you’re curious to see how I arrived at that conclusion, you can now find Smile streaming on Paramount+. As luck would have it, the American remake of The Ring is also currently available to stream there.
Categorized: Streaming News
