Laura Hasn't Slept

The short film that gave rise to one of the best horror movies of 2022 served as a pretty promising pilot with a pretty good concept. Its short length is quite satisfying and offers a story that starts out as simple therapy, but halfway through everything turns upside down. The nightmare that this short film presents to us is very well set with excellent production. It is a very professional short film with great quality. It is engaging and generates quite a bit of tension. Laura Hasn't Sleep is one of the best horror short films ever made and they made a wise decision in wanting to adapt it into a feature film. It really deserved to be expanded through a movie. My final rating for this short film is a 9/10.

The main character in "Smile" (2022) was female. There was reason to expect a male one in "Smile 2" (2024), but that expectation wasn't met.

This isn't a horror film series with an iconic heroine like "Alien" where Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley would remain the main character for more than one film, and not without reason. Talking about two horror films with only six days between them, chronologically, and the main character in either is female. One actress in the first one, another in the other, and that isn't a problem.

It was clear in both those films the evil thing our heroes would have to deal with was a supernatural entity and could appear as anyone, man or woman, it could take any human form. But in this short horror film that was the origin of both "Smile" and "Smile 2", there are only two characters on screen and the evil supernatural thing to deal with.

Laura, a young woman who is the main character here, makes it clear her nightmares, the ones that she has been having for a few nights now, the ones she can no longer stand, the ones she tries to avoid now by choosing to fight off sleep, are about a man. Not something supernatural appearing in the guise of different, various individuals, it is a man, specifically, a man, even though his face is different every time, it is a bad man this young woman is supernaturally haunted by.

Man bad woman good, clear on that. What's also clear is the creator wants more than a horror film, he wants there to also be something like humor. Whether or not it is misplaced is open to discussion. What's also clear is the open ending. Or, rather, a lacking ending, and that isn't good either, because if one accepts "Smile" and "Smile 2" as a direct continuation of "Laura Hasn't Slept", then there is a problem.

In both of them the entity could show up any time in any human form and didn't require the victim to sleep, even though it did resort to nightmares. But here, it's like the entity only shows up in the nightmares. And the whole "chain" idea, this thing going from one person to another, none of it is in "Laura Hasn't Slept". And the whole short film is basically one sequence, and you can't really tell where the definitive line is between the reality and the nightmare.

The visuals and the sounds work fine, and the acting is also a plus, it's the content, the substance beneath the package that could and should have used more care, should have been paid more attention to, but they clearly were banking on the package to fool the audience into thinking there was something highly sophisticated underneath.

Not that anything much should be expected from a short film anyway, but all "Laura Hasn't Slept" accomplishes is give the audience a scare or two. And again, it is impressive technically and when it comes to the performances, but it has no point to make, it's bright, loud, and pointless.

Parker Finn's Laura Hasn't Slept (2020) is a chilling, minimalist short film that lays the foundation for his later feature Smile (2022). The story centers on Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey), a young woman plagued by recurring nightmares involving a shapeshifting entity that wears an unnervingly human smile. Seeking help, Laura visits her therapist, Dr. Parsons (Lew Temple), but their session quickly dissolves into psychological terror as Laura's perception of reality begins to fracture. The therapist's calm demeanor becomes menacing, the office space warps into a decaying dreamscape, and Laura realizes that she may never truly wake up. The short's tight, 11-minute runtime transforms a simple therapy session into a claustrophobic descent into paranoia, where the boundaries between dream and reality collapse. Stasey's performance is gripping-her exhaustion and frantic energy make Laura feel both deeply human and trapped in her own mind. Temple's measured voice and shifting expressions heighten the sense of uncertainty, blurring whether he is a healer, a figment, or the monster itself.

Thematically, Laura Hasn't Slept explores trauma, repression, and the terror of facing one's own mind. The recurring "smile" symbolizes false reassurance-a mask that hides existential horror beneath politeness and control. Parker Finn turns the language of therapy into a metaphor for confrontation with buried pain: Laura's attempts to understand her dreams only bring her closer to what she fears most. The short suggests that nightmares are not intrusions but manifestations of truth we refuse to face. Cinematographically, Finn and his team use shallow focus, dim lighting, and creeping camera movement to convey the sensation of confinement and disorientation. The framing isolates Laura within sterile, symmetrical compositions that mirror her mental imprisonment, and the gradual distortion of space-from clean office lines to rotting walls-visualizes her descent into madness.

What makes Laura Hasn't Slept particularly fascinating is its direct connection to Smile (2022), which expands its core idea into a feature-length exploration of trauma as contagion. Stasey even reprises her role as Laura in Smile's opening sequence, linking both films as part of the same cursed continuum. The good lies in Finn's ability to extract tension from simplicity-strong performances, psychological depth, and visual economy make the short unforgettable. The bad, if any, is its brevity: the mythology feels tantalizingly underexplored, and the final scare hints at a larger horror that ends too soon. Yet, as a prototype for Smile, Laura Hasn't Slept succeeds completely-it's concise, haunting, and disturbingly prophetic.

The idea of being trapped in a nightmare is a trope of the horror genre, explored in Parker Finn's short film "Laura Hasn't Slept", a short film that revolves around this question and that laid the groundwork for its passage to feature film in the successful Smile.

The short film starts in media res with the protagonist, Laura. (Caitlin Stasey) in the office of her therapist, the calm and kindly Dr. Parsons (Lew Temple). Laura is clearly not in a good state of mind, to the point that she has refused to sleep for several days, due to a recurring nightmare she has about a creepy smiling man who threatens to show her "his true face." The tension of the short is very well executed, slowly building as we learn more about Laura, her nightmares and the monster that haunts them.

This premise is by no means new, it combines the concept of avoiding sleep to avoid confronting a terrifying entity, with the theme of the stigmatization of mental illness in the horror genre. Titles like Them from 2002 come to mind, and above all, any film in the Freddie Krueger saga. With these precedents, the viewer instinctively knows what is to come and it seems inevitable, but the director shows a great ability to smoothly transition from one atmospheric level to the next. With that use of slow panoramas as an element of suspense, which the director has turned into a trademark of the house.

The idea of using the smile as the main concept in a horror film is not new, perhaps its oldest literary antecedent is the short story by H. G. Wells, "Pollock And The Porroh Man", in which terrible visions of a smiling head haunts an English expeditionary in the Sierra Leone of colonial imperialism in the 19th century. An overexploited concept, that year after year, there are constant revisions and variations, especially in the short film genre.

In short, Laura Hasn't Slept tells a brief but terrifying story, where she plays with the dichotomy of madness and demonstrates a good know-how to create tension and propose sequences with a captivating atmosphere.

*A more detailed review can be found on the youtube channel Kristonkino.

I can see this being the inspiration for Smile (2022). The visual effects used were disgusting in a good way and on point. I especially liked the CGI for the doctor's face. It's a bit different from Smile though. Smile was more about trauma affecting people and a mysterious curse. Laura Hasn't Slept reminded me a bit of Nightmare on Elm Street, because here the curse is more of a ''sleep demon'', I would call it. In Smile the characters can see the manifestation of the curse even when they are awake while in this short film it seems like the curse mostly manifests itself while the character is asleep. This short film is very intense and has a creepy atmospheric horror vibe. Both the actors involved do a great job portraying their characters. Very solid overall, my rating is 8/10.