Mark L. Smith keeps returning to people struggling to survive, but his characters can be less convincing than their predicaments. We value his interest in grief and companionship, though the scripts too often give people troubles instead of personalities.
Fi1m perspective
In Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters (2024), the chase stops so Kate can stand in a doorway and be sad. Mark L. Smith's screenplay keeps giving grief precedence over the tornadoes, even when the pause adds little to our understanding of her. We grew impatient with those interruptions because Daisy Edgar-Jones's restraint could not make repeated sadness feel like new information. Smith takes her suffering seriously, but gives her too little else to do.
His early films were horror: he wrote and directed Séance (2006), then wrote Vacancy (2007) and The Hole (2009). Wider opportunities came with The Revenant (2015), co-written with director Alejandro González Iñárritu. His emphasis there on visual action and sparse dialogue helps explain the move towards stories of survival in harsh environments. The later work stretches from George Clooney's The Boys in the Boat (2023) to disaster films and television mysteries.
With UNTAMED (2025), co-created with Elle Smith, the difficulty spreads across six episodes. Eric Bana and Lily Santiago make an engaging investigative pair, and the murder investigation takes them through Yosemite National Park. Yet the writers keep the case moving with familiar complications and forced turns. We can enjoy their company for a stretch without finding enough reason to follow the mystery to its end.
Ridley Scott's The Dog Stars (2026), which Smith adapted from Peter Heller's novel, offers a more appealing possibility: survival through companionship. Its interest in kindness is welcome, and the contrast between Jacob Elordi's subdued Hig and Josh Brolin's more forceful Bangley gives their scenes some life. The screenplay, however, supplies too little individual character to sustain the quieter stretches, while convenient plotting makes people behave as the next scene requires. More violence would do nothing to fix that; the relationships need work. If disaster films are your pleasure, start with Twisters, provided you can tolerate a script that keeps postponing the next storm.
Biography
Mark L. Smith is an American screenwriter, film producer and director. He wrote and directed the 2006 film Séance, which won awards at the Eureka Springs Digital Film Festival and ShockFest. He has since worked primarily as a screenwriter.
His credits include the films Vacancy (2007), The Hole (2009), The Revenant (2015), Overlord (2018), The Midnight Sky (2020), The Marsh King's Daughter (2023), The Boys in the Boat (2023) and Twisters (2024). He co-created the 2025 Netflix series Untamed with Elle Smith and created the miniseries American Primeval (2025).
