Smile (2022)

directed by Parker Finn

USA

115 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I initially dismissed this when it first came out, because not only did the trailers make it look cheesy and generic, but it also appeared to be a horror movie centering around mental illness, a sub-genre I avoid like the plague after learning from experience that it contains nothing good and a lot of stereotypes and stigmatization. However, I did see somebody whose opinions about horror movies I generally trust watch it and say that it's not what you think it is, that it uses tropes that have been done before to more effectiveness than other films have in the past. With a DVD in hand, I discovered that Smile is indeed not what you think it is. It is actually a horror movie that's nuanced, genuinely unsettling, and does not use mental illness tropes in quite the same way other horror movies usually do.

From the first minute, Smile makes it clear that it's not a movie about how scary mentally ill people are. It's a movie about how scary it is to be mentally ill, but it goes deeper than that. The vulnerability, exclusion, and societal stigma of being someone who "sees things", someone who meets the criteria the average person would define as a "nutcase", is the underlying horror of most of what happens to the main character, Rose, herself a therapist. Mental illness is never presented here as inherently connected to violent behavior. What's scary instead is that Rose is surrounded by people who don't even think before dismissing people who experience delusions or hallucinations as crazy, basket cases, beyond hope, etc. This is really a movie about being held in thrall to things your brain is trying to convince you are real while you get no sympathy whatsoever from anybody around you, who are all unconcerned with what's going on with you. It's never happened to them, so it's not their problem and they can't imagine what it's like and mostly just want you to be in a facility somewhere, out of sight. That's pretty scary to me.

The meat and potatoes of the story is essentially a little bit like a combination of Ringu and It Follows, without the video tapes or the... well, you know. Rose witnesses a woman, who she assumes is suffering from delusions, violently commit suicide in her hospital, in an evaluation room with what look like the most uncomfortable chairs known to humankind (seriously). This initial death is possibly the most important factor in setting up the events to come, and even though the actress portraying the patient (this is Caitlin Stasey - who is also playing this role while faking an American accent) is only in the film for a very short while, the sheer creepiness of her explanation of what she's seeing is crucial to get the viewer set up for what they're going into. The way she says that it looks like people, but it's not; how she describes the smile as "the worst smile I've ever seen in my life"... wide, unnatural smiles are, by now, an established trope in horror going back very nearly a hundred years (The Man Who Laughs) and off the screen into literature as well. But how it's handled here brings back the genuine eeriness of that imagery and takes it away from more recent horror films that seem to treat it as just a given: big smile scary, ooh, be scared.

It's really important that the actual image of the smile is not altered in any way. I've seen many horror films that use a digitally-enhanced creepy smile as their main selling point (most egregiously Truth or Dare, which I did not watch but saw many trailers for) and it always looks awful. No, it's much creepier to have a smile in a place you don't expect it than to have an overly sinister, clearly physically impossible smile that is screaming to you about how scared you should be of it. Context is king in Smile, and it's treated as such. There are jump scares, but the time between the jump scares is as creepy or even creepier. Sound design is also incredibly important here. The discomfiting, jarring score was composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who has also done music for many things you might know for  being unsettling, such as Black Mirror, Utopia, The Girl With All the Gifts and - I'm gonna pull out a deep cut here to shamelessly show off and also drop a recommendation - The Advantages of Traveling by Train.

So I want to talk a little bit about the "creature", for lack of a better term, because not only does this movie use the contagious suicide thing as metaphor for inherited trauma but also as a literal being that definitely exists. We get almost no information on exactly what this thing is, we only see the effect it has on the world and descriptions of the hold it has on people like the first patient who dies and the chain of other deaths that she's connected to. But instead of being solidly metaphor, with no meat to it, or a kind of hand-wavy ephemeral entity (I can easily see a lesser movie have Rose contact some google-savvy priest who comes up with fake grimoires claiming this to be an obscure demon with a sibilant-filled name), this is an actual creature. We do at one point see it in what I feel is probably its "true form" and my inner (I mean, outer, really, just look at the rest of this blog) monster lover ate that up. So even though we don't explicitly get information on what this thing is, because everybody who encounters it is too busy dying or killing other people to look into it any further, we can piece together what we do know to form a picture of some kind of conscious, thinking entity originating from elsewhere that is attracted to the human mind and enjoys spreading itself via hosts that it rapidly burns through. There really is something extremely J-horror about this. I would be surprised if the director had not seen such films as Ringu, Suicide Club, or One Missed Call. It's like if the basic concept of those films was mashed together and also given a physical body at one point, and that's extremely effective as horror.

Unfortunately I do feel like this movie kind of falls apart around the final 25 minutes, because it seems to feel like there has to be a direct confrontation between the protagonist and the creature, but then also insists that everything is hopeless, two concepts I don't feel were mutually compatible in this instance. It does definitely make for better, bleaker horror, but I guess I did want to see a different, maybe more optimistic ending. (It could also have been that around that time, my foot fell asleep and I had to relocate, breaking my immersion.) Smile is relentless and draws you deeper down an ominous rabbit hole until just kind of petering out into a forgettable finale, with the exception of the unveiling of that nice disgusting creature. But in all categories where a similarly-themed film might drop the ball, this one manages to stand out. I think it's to director Parker Finn's credit that such a trite concept is handled refreshingly well, and it's rare that a movie like this would break into the mainstream horror market - although obviously said market doesn't quite know what to do with it, judging by how many people like me were turned off by its outward appearance.