★★☆☆☆
A demonic board game unleashes a poorly-thought-through monster, in a film that never really develops its central idea.
Lawrence Fowler’s board-game horror has a decent hook, but sadly very little idea what to do with it. Play the cursed party game, summon the demon who punishes sins, the demon kills you… rinse and repeat. To its credit it at least stays broadly coherent, which is more than plenty of low-budget genre efforts manage, and once the real villain is finally unmasked there’s an intense energy to him that the rest of the film could have used far earlier.
The trouble is everything around that. The monster arrives with no characterisation to speak of, a shape to be scared of rather than a presence, and the scares can’t survive pacing this tiresome. The acting is patchy at the best of times. The players have a hidden secret that the monster is punishing, but it’s hard to be invested – everyone has “sins”, so there’ll always be a reason to get the chop. Who cares what it is?
And then there’s the small matter of the film’s own mythology, which it can’t keep straight: at one point we’re solemnly told that “grin”, as inscribed on the game box, isn’t a word at all, merely four runes that happen to resemble letters, only for GRIN to reappear later, plainly written, in capitals in an entirely different font. If you can’t be bothered to keep your central curse internally consistent, why should anyone in the audience lean in?
There’s the skeleton of a watchable creature feature here, and Fowler clearly knows the shape one should take. But it needed a tighter script, a livelier cast and a monster worth meeting, and it has none of those. Undemanding monster-loving crowds who’ll forgive a lot for a demon and some gore might scrape by; and it’ll surely get some views from people who can’t quite remember what Smile is called, but everyone else can skip it.
Grin played at Tubi FrightFest in London.