(Originally published at Gunaxin on September 29, 2022.)
It’s definitely spooky season, folks… and Smile is here to usher it in. Bearing creepy sound design, drained colors, and jump scares that hit you right in the keister, Smile is here to do one job: freak you out. In that, it succeeds mightily, with a standout lead performance by Sosie Bacon anchoring us to the floor, where freaky things swirl and dive around us while making us remember what it’s like to be scared.
Well… at least on a superficial level. Smile works much in the way as an amusement park haunted house does – you can see the work put into the scares and you’re damn sure frightened. The building “oooooOOOOOooooOOOhhh”s and the discordant violins wind us up and make us feel like we’re walking on a knife’s edge. But take the spooky music and jump scares away, and what’s left? Writer/director Parker Finn wants us to believe that the throughline of trauma and its unending cycle will be enough to carry us through.
In certain respects, it does; there is certainly a hook to being pessimistic about our chances of rising above the negative moments that carve themselves into our memories and make us who we are. There’s something about being stuck in a Möbius Strip of what the past has imprinted upon us, and no matter how much we try to escape or rise above these touchpoints in our lives, they’re always there to remind us that we’ve got a long way to go to truly conquer them.
Such is the case with Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), our avatar in this case. The first thing we see is her witnessing her mother’s death by overdose as a child, and it’s something she carries with her into her adult life as a clinician in an emergency psychiatric ward. Her interactions with her sister Holly (Gillian Zinser) are still riddled with survival guilt, Rose being shattered by having been in the room as her mother slipped away and Holly still bearing the weight of having left Rose all by herself to deal with their mother.
In the first minutes, we’re set up to know that Rose is carrying these demons with her. And it’s made worse when a fresh patient frantically details being chased by something unseen, only to turn silent while she smiles maniacally and slits her own throat from her left ear to her internal jugular vein. There’s a corollary that instantly jumps from trauma to death, setting up this film’s dominoes to fall catastrophically.
Throughout Smile, Parker Finn visually and thematically deploys red threads between a rash of similar violent deaths and the cycle of trauma, attempting to bring the film to a “real” place where his commentary will stick. Sosie Bacon does wonderful, nuanced work in making us believe Rose as she goes through the wringer. Finn creates a suffocating atmosphere with muted colors, dark imagery, and a mix of spooky music and sound design – all of which truly assault our senses, hammering at us and making us expect the worst every time Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s horror house score winds up to a crescendo.
But when that crescendo suddenly drops to nothing and we’re left hanging, waiting for a scare that won’t come, we start to get fatigued after these near-Pavlovian rises and falls don’t pay off. Of course, we’re expecting it; this film wears its inspirations on its sleeve, as opposed to gently incorporating them wittily. The notion of short-term, fatal curses certainly draws a lot of its juice from the J-horror classic Ringu and its effective American remake by Gore Verbinski.
Smile feels like one of the first mainstream films that seems cut not from classic horror; we’re entering the age where filmmakers are influenced by the era introduced by the likes of Kevin Williamson and mid-‘90s Wes Craven. Horror rooted in a more meta, gritty era where the frights were no longer separated into safely gory R or trepidatious PG. The era where PG-13 pushed the limits of fright to make up for the lack of blood n’ guts. The era where smart, quippy, less stereotypical heroes and victims were better learned about the situations they were in.
It’s evident in the tones his characters take with each other – an always-“on” voice which makes it seem like everyone’s got the perfect retort without so much as a millisecond of delay. Also, the base story surrounding the curse and its machinations seems right out of The Ring and the Final Destination series – horror movies that also had their ways with us, toying with the audience until we were screaming in anticipation. Finn seems comfortable in teasing us out and driving us mad by having our expectations whetted and only sated a handful of times. The rest of it is just buildup to keep us on tenterhooks, making us guess if he’s going to give us something that’ll make the excruciating wait worth it.
When he delivers… hoo boy, it’s effective. Just about as effective as hundreds of barrels of napalm flung onto an already-roaring bonfire. Some of his visual punches land with devastating effect, being shown and quickly grabbed away from us, leaving us with the residual pictures in our minds’ eyes while we are catapulted out of a dream sequence or left to recoil in horror at the terrifying effect these scenes have on Rose (and us, screaming almost as much or louder than she does), having been cursed upon witnessing her patient commit ghastly suicide in front of her.
This curse – a mentally torturous final set of days while an evil force feeds upon its victims – has its own secrets and implications, leading to the film’s central theme: the aforementioned specter of trauma, past and present. Finn makes us feel this in every way possible – visually, mentally, and aurally – and that is this film’s purpose. We’re here to feel the freefall of fright, the adrenaline of a controlled unknown, which Finn knowingly leads us to by shading horror with liberally familiar brushstrokes. And although we recognize all too often where Rose might be going, Smile makes us all too happy to follow along.
