Smile (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

In an unexpected twist, Smile is the latest horror film that works best as a metaphor for trauma and mental illness. Marketing billed it as a straightforward horror flick with a nasty streak, most targeted at teenagers and twenty-somethings, not unlike the aesthetic of Ouija or Truth or Dare, with fast edits, jump scares, and an easily recognizable (if shape-shifting) evil entity that allows its cast to be both spooked and spooky. But it doesn't take long into its runtime to see that Smile is up to a very different game indeed, one that lands rather somewhere between The Ring and It Follows, and it has in mind much weightier themes than simple survival against a mysterious and relentless threat.

Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) sits with a new patient, a young woman who was rushed into the psychiatric ward, and they talk for quite a while. A PhD candidate, the patient is shivering and shaking, convinced something has been following and terrorizing her since she witnessed her professor commit a particularly violent suicide earlier that week. She says this entity is toying with her, appearing at random and in different forms -- sometimes as a dead person, sometimes as a living person, maybe even your spouse or parent -- but always with an unhinged, menacing smile. Then the student has a bit of a fit and, when it subsides, bears a creepy, forced smile of her own and proceeds to slit her own throat. It doesn't take long for Dr. Cotter to start seeing those creepy smiles dogging her as well.

Bacon is really very effective at sustaining a high-tension demeanor that is somewhat stoic yet always relatable and realistic, not unlike the now-popular technique of Elisabeth Moss. Her character is primed to be triggered by this sudden rash of suicides she uncovers, of which her most recent patient was in fact the most recent to die, due to her own mother's suicide some years before. In as much as Dr. Cotter's profession is to help and destigmatize mental illness, the film's screenplay intensely amps up the realistic and problematic dialogue that does the opposite: words like "crazies" and "head cases" and "nutjobs" litter the dialogue. Cotter's fiancee Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) discusses "researching" mental illnesses online, though we're left wondering if he did much looking past the initial Google results and splashy headlines. This external tension (for us) thematically challenges the internal tension (for Cotter) of whether or not she is experiencing a severe episode of mental illness, as she wonders aloud multiple times -- along with almost every other character, including her therapist (a stunning Robin Weigert) and her boss (Kal Penn)-- if her hallucinations and lost time are evidence of her own state of mind or if they are being enacted on her by the entity. Her sister (Gillian Zinzer) is perhaps the most dangerous voice in Cotter's head, as she shares the knowledge that all this pain and fear could be traced back to their mother. If it even really exists outside of their imaginations.

Much like The Ring and It Follows, the plot of this movie is twofold: first, the protagonist must convince herself of what's happening to her and try to convince others to help, and second, she must research and experiment on it to determine how to end the relentless threat. Dr. Cotter, thankfully, doesn't have to work too hard to convince one person, her ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), a cop assigned to her case. Tracking down suicide after suicide, each with only one witness who later became a victim, they eventually meet a survivor (Rob Morgan), now incarcerated for murdering another person rather than himself. His testimony is as helpful as it is horrifying, and shortly thereafter the good doctor girds her loins for a direct confrontation with her supernatural stalker.

Despite its title, Smile is a grim affair, shockingly violent and haunting long after the credits roll. From its marketing and subject matter, I was expecting a silly, nonsensical romp chock-full of cheap scares and bad performances that was fun if only for a single viewing. This is not that. While it isn't as polished, focused, or groundbreaking like some of the other films to which I've compared it, Smile manages to sustain its gripping sense of dread -- and, it's true, several highly effective jump scares -- due to excellent performances, cinematography, editing, and writing. Most importantly, its handling of mental illness and suicide I'd categorize along other recent films like Relic and The Night House in sensitivity, creativity, and ambiguity. I love that horror filmmakers are embracing metaphoric conceits to explore mental illness, to combat historical use of mental illness as shorthand or an excuse for horror (think The Silence of the Lambs as one of the best examples of this).