Smile

Grade: B-

A young woman is brought to the psychiatric emergency ward, inconsolable with fear. Something is out to get her, she says. It looks like people, but it’s not a person. It often appears as people she knows. It has a horrific smile. Not a happy one. The worst she’s ever seen in her life. She emphasizes that she’s not insane. She’s a PhD student. She’s been terrorized by this presence ever since she witnessed one of her teachers hitting himself to death with a hammer, just 4 days earlier. There appears to be a confrontation with this invisible enemy, while the doctor tries to assure the young lady that nobody else is in the room with them. The doctor turns around to see her standing still, with a psychotic smile on her face, as she slits her own throat with a shard from a broken vase.

This is one of the opening scenes of Smile, in theaters tomorrow. The doctor is Rose Cotter, played by Sosie Bacon (Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick’s daughter). She has been carrying some unhealed trauma: at the age of 10, she saw her mother accidentally OD on alcohol and pills. Dr. Cotter begins to be haunted by visions – that nobody can see but her – of the smiling girl at the psych ward. The girl witnessed somebody committing suicide, and the professor she saw kill himself saw one too. This “smile monster” feeds on trauma. Dr. Cotter realizes she’s now part of a chain, and she’s next.

Writer/director Parker Finn makes his feature film debut with Smile. It’s based on an 11-minute short film of his called Laura Hasn’t Slept. I liked the innovative, intricate ways he was able to find opportunities for jump scares. Sometimes they happen in scene transitions, with a sudden horn honk or train whistle. Other times, a scene will end loudly, only for the next one to suddenly start quietly, which can be just as startling. He seems to enjoy tilting the camera upside down. I don’t know why, and I wonder if he does. There are an awful lot of fake-outs, where it turns out it was just a dream or a hallucination. The first one was my favorite – a great moment I think Hitchcock would have been proud of. Sosie Bacon has inherited some talented genes, and is effective as our lead. The only cast member I recognized was my friend Nick Arapoglou, who has a fair few minutes of screen time as Rose’s brother-in-law. I was very excited and proud to see him, and my completely biased self felt he brought a lot to his small supporting part.

There’s a statement throughout Smile – a social commentary on mental health – that keeps almost being made and then doesn’t. When terms like “head case,” “crazy,” and “nut job” get casually tossed around in the movie, somebody jumps in to shoot that derogatory language down. There is more that could have been made about unpacking repressed trauma, and I thought Smile would finally go there full-force in the climax. But alas, it eschews that to instead settle into standard horror fare, and potentially set up a Smile 2. The song that plays over the closing credits is an oldie that everyone knows. The same thing was done to great effect in Barbarian a couple of weeks ago, but the song choice at the end of Smile just seemed random and shallow. Smile takes us right up to an emotional and psychological precipice, but doesn’t push us over. What we are left with is still decent fall spooky fun – but it’s a shame, because Smile could have really said something and gone somewhere.

Grade: B-