"Smile:" A very good horror movie. Not a great one. It's fine. It gets the job done.
It's a very human movie at a time when filmmakers seem to despise humans.
I am not in the business of shelling out $30 to see many movies in the theater these days, because movies today tend to be exceptionally bad and thirty bucks is a ton of money to drop on a poor-quality product of any kind. (It would be less if I didn’t get popcorn, but I’m not going to not get popcorn. I’m not a sadist.) I ponied up for Smile not because I had any real high expectations for it but because it’s October, and October in my municipal ward means horror movies, and Smile looked like it had that fairly winning combination of dumb horror scares and lame conventions that would actually make the high price tag worth it solely in order to trash the film while watching it. There’s a complex quantitative analysis we apply to these sorts of situations that would be very hard to fully explain before you lost interest.
I was pleasantly surprised by Smile, not because it’s a great horror movie, nor because it’s bad enough to clown on it while cramming fistfuls of popcorn in your maw. I liked it because it’s a relatively rare form of movie these days, one in which some people had a pretty decent idea and executed it quite well, to the point that you don’t feel like you wasted two hours and a considerable amount of money seeing it. By present standards that qualifies it as Oscar bait (too bad nobody cares about the Oscars anymore).
Smile is on its face a movie about some sort of evil entity whose malevolent antagonism jumps from one person to the next via horrifying events; specifically it will force its victim to kill himself in a horrific way in front of another person, after which the witness’s trauma becomes the basis of the creature’s new supernatural animus. Well, it all kind of made sense in the theater, anyway, at least according to the relatively lax logical demands of horror movies.
It will not surprise you to learn that Smile, like most of the really good horror movies, is deeply allegorical: It is a violent and graphic examination of the ways in which the human person is often wrought by pain, by suffering, by guilt, by unhealed psychic injuries and resentment and bitterness toward others and toward oneself. Allegory is of course the stock-in-trade of horror; it is a way of exploring brutal and unhappy things that have ceased to seem either brutal or unhappy by dint of their commonness. It’s why David Cronenberg’s two-hour meditation on aging and decay—The Fly̛—spends the entire film painfully dissolving its protagonist into a puddle of fetid slop, or why Brian de Palma in Carrie responds to adolescent exclusion and cruelty by massacring an entire prom of 17-year-olds. You get the message loud and clear.
Smile delivers its message almost too loudly and clearly at times; several characters do exposition and refer to “trauma” enough times that it starts to feel like an undergrad feminist workshop, all overanalytical and self-aware to the point of being kind of embarrassing. But this is the worst of its artistic sins, and the best films, like the best people, make up for their shortcomings thoroughly enough that you don’t dwell on it too long at all.
Where Smile succeeds most fulsomely is probably in its treatment of how madness—whether borne of traumatic stress or a million other things—can ruin your life and the lives of those around you. The film’s protagonist, a psychiatrist in a local tranq ward, spends most of the middle third of the movie trying to convince her friends, her family and anyone who will listen that (a) she’s being stalked by an evil entity, and (b) she’s not crazy. She does this by showing up at people’s homes, pale and hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked, babbling about monsters and flashing gruesome, gory pictures of suicide victims and periodically shouting, “I’m not crazy!” She behaves, in other words, exactly as a deeply crazy person would behave, so much so that at times it’s not at all clear if the movie is pulling a sort of Shining-style feint toward supernaturality as a way of telling a story about crippling mental illness. In effect Smile is two sort of movies in one, kind of like those upside-down-backwards teen celebrity magazines we sometimes bought as kids: One half of the movie involves a woman being terrorized by a malignant being, and the other half involves an entire network of people being ground down and exhausted by their loved one’s descent into frantic, wild-eyed insanity.
As a technical matter the movie succeeds quite well at conveying the horror of it all. I say that with some surprise, because the film is absolutely rife with “jump scares,” those crashing crescendos of on-screen surprise that constitute about 98% of the horror movie praxis these days. But Smile uses its scares—both jumps and others— rather intelligently. Much of the unsettling imagery and frightening sequences sort of take place at a distance, at the end of a dark hallway or in the shadows of a door jamb or even at the top of a brightly lit staircase. It’s a useful and workable allusion to the sad and maddening realities of mental collapse itself: It’s always there, always terrorizing you, but it’s usually just out of your reach, ruining your life while remaining firmly outside of your grasp.
I am sad to say that, in rather proud cinematic tradition, the movie fails to stick its landing, and in some ways it completely botches the final act. In the end, the monster ends up winning: It appears at first like our hero has vanquished the being, subduing the trauma-symbol in her mind by strong-arming it into cowed subsidence. There’s a smart and affective way to tell that kind of story, where you beat down and throttle the learned horror in your life not so that it necessarily disappears but so that you can control it to the point that it doesn’t matter all that much anymore. Yet the movie finishes with a pretty standard self-immolation and a stock unhappy ending that feels dull and wasted. The film’s lead, Sosie Bacon, has defended that decision: “Yes, it’s tragic, but I think it’s saying that sometimes, even if we try and do everything, trauma can overcome us.” But we already knew that; everybody knows it and has seen it a million times in their own personal lives. A movie like Smile should probably show us less familiar things; it should cause us to think about our lives, and the decisions we make in them, and the things we endure in them, in new and practically meaningful ways. “Trauma can overcome us” is old news; “I won the brutal struggle against my own inner demons and am now a more fully formed and fully actualized human being” is rarer and more striking.
But oh well. You can’t win them all. Smile is kind of a winner, though—worth seeing if you like the genre, worth reflecting on as a treatment of deep and personal things we’ve all experienced. The film’s title and hook—”Smile”—is of course a pretty explicit reference to the way in which everyone covers up the painful and debilitating things we often carry around inside of ourselves: We smile instead so that people don’t know what’s happening with us and ultimately so that we ourselves do not have to confront it. You won’t leave the theater smiling after seeing this movie, but in the end that’s sort of the point.