Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Parker Finn
Starring: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob
Morgan
Jamie Lee Curtis has been heavily mocked for constantly prattling on
about how the current Halloween trilogy is about "trauma."
Unlike Halloween: H20, which Curtis sadly threw out with the bath water in an attempt to big
up the latest iteration, the new Halloween movies do a
hackneyed job of presenting its heroine's trauma. The same can't be said
for Smile, the feature debut of director Parker Finn and an adaptation of
his earlier short film. Finn doesn't need his leading lady to tell us
all how his movie's about trauma, because it's organically embedded into
the film.
Because mainstream horror movies tend to lean towards entertainment,
few have broached the subject of suicide. The most notable example to
the contrary is Mark Robson's Val Lewton produced chiller
The Seventh Victim, in which a woman is egged on to taking her life by a Satanic cult.
Though largely played for laughs, John Landis's
An American Werewolf in London also features suicide as
part of its setup, with the spirits of the titular werewolf's victims
imploring him to take his own life to free them from limbo.
Smile has a similarly oppressive mood to Robson's film,
and borrows the conceit of an over-the-top moment of violence suddenly
being revealed to be a dream from Landis's movie. But it's Jacques
Tourneur's Night of the Demon that it most heavily borrows
from, right down to a climax that switches the film from atmospheric
supernatural thriller to something closer to a monster movie.
Like Tourneur's film and its many subsequent imitators,
Smile features a protagonist stricken with a curse and
struggling to free themselves before it's too late. In this case the
curse befalls Rose (Sosie Bacon), a hospital psychiatrist who
witnessed her mother's suicide as a young girl. Now as an adult, Rose
witnesses another suicide, this time of a young woman who claims she is
being haunted by an evil presence that takes the form of people she
knows. Smashing a vase, the woman takes a shard and slits her throat,
all while wearing a beaming smile.
As if that wasn't enough for Rose to deal with, in the days following
the incident she begins to experience nightmarish hallucinations like
those described by the suicide victim. After a particularly demented
episode at her nephew's birthday party (a sequence mounted deliciously
by Finn to mine our apprehension at what might be about to go down),
Rose loses the trust of her loved ones who write her off as crazy.
Turning to her ex-boyfriend, police detective Joel (Kyle Gallner,
once a staple of 2000s horror movies), Rose investigates her condition
and finds she's part of a chain, and that unless she finds a way of
breaking said chain, her days are numbered.
What follows is a procedural horror in the vein of
The Ring, with our heroine attempting to save themselves against increasingly
supernaturally weighted odds. There's a touch of
Final Destination in the sense of impending doom, and from
that franchise it borrows a trip to a prison to visit someone who
managed to survive a previous grapple with this scenario.
But despite its many influences, Smile is largely its own
creation and may herald a new horror franchise. What makes it
stand out from most mainstream American horror movies is its willingness
to take us down some very dark paths. It doesn't shy away from the fact
that its villain is essentially suicide, but to my sensibilities at
least, it never feels distasteful. Bacon is thoroughly convincing in the
role of someone losing their mind ironically because those around her
mistakenly believe she's losing touch with sanity. The film's most
tragic element is how aside from the still smitten Joel, Rose's "loved
ones" are more concerned with the negative effects her instability might
have on their own lives than on her own actual well-being. Viewers with
their own mental health issues may well feel recognised rather than
exploited.
It's when Finn feels the need to deliver a visual representation of his
film's conceptual antagonist that things get a little silly. The smiling
faces make for a creepy image, but he takes things into
Evil Dead territory in a climax that plays like it's been
tacked onto the wrong movie. After almost two hours of effective
broodiness, Finn leaves us looking at something that frankly, looks
ridiculous, though he does make up for this by sending us out on a
downer with a final shot more reflective of the film's unrelenting
grimness.
