A great marketing campaign can do wonders for a movie. The Blair Witch Project comes to mind: everyone thought that footage was real. So does Cloverfield and its shaky cam monster hints. Smile is the latest one, scaring the sh*t out of MLB audiences over the past few weeks with their creepy, creepy premise. Is all this great promotion worthy of the movie it’s scaring people to the theaters for?
Kinda. Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a therapist specializing in helping people deal with past traumas and manic episodes. One day, she gets a patient named Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey), who tells Rose she’s being followed by an entity that’s always smiling at her. Before Rose can “help” the girl, Laura commits suicide right in front of her, traumatizing poor rose. Her boss (Kal Penn) asks her to take some time off, but Rose struggles to shake this horrible moment from her life. More importantly, every few hours/days, people start coming up to her, smiling and staring just like Laura described…
Smile is built for unsettling jump scares, which happen early and often. Director Parker Finn uses the slow pan around the room as Rose gathers her surrounding to sneak in creepy smiling people which set the heart aflutter. Or Rose will turn all the way around and there will be a smiling person right behind her, with shocking musical accompaniment, to jump people out of their chairs. I wish the movie built their scares a little more. The best horror moments in Smile are ones where Rose becomes more deeply unsettled, usually by a person just blankly smiling either at her or in her direction without saying anything, which sets Rose and the audience on edge and builds slowly and menacingly. But those scares aren’t used as often, and the choices Parker Finn makes will make the audience feel more like they’re being screwed with than being entertainingly tortured by some great horror movie scenes.
And that might be because Smile is going for something bigger. The movie makes it clear right from the get go that Rose ended up as a therapist because of a horrible moment from her past. Traumas that early in life bury deep within a person. So deep in fact, that it’s possible to never recover from them, and can take years of therapy to get over. And, more depressingly, anything can trigger that trauma buried deep within out of rising back to the surface so you have to deal with it…again. Watching Smile’s faces just open Rose’s soul back up to her horrible past is heartbreaking and all too real. Plus, the heartbreak grows as Rose tries to cope with this new…condition she’s facing. People around her cannot possibly understand what she’s gone through like her fiance Trevor (Jessie T. Usher). Because he doesn’t understand, Trevor gets horribly uncomfortable and worse, skeptical of what Rose is experiencing because to him she sounds insane. And his attempts to help are really more ways for HIM to pass helping her onto someone else like Rose’s old therapist Madeline (Robin Weigert). When trauma rears its ugly head, it wholly encompasses Rose, dropping everything just to try to wrangle it in which scares away people she thought loved her, isolating her, and making the monster grow in power, manipulating her sometimes just for the hell of it. The third act makes Smile lose its allegory for a big finale, but the ground work is solid enough that I wish the movie took one more pass at the script, which could have made their movie truly something special.
Smile, though you’re heart is breaking. That was the only choice anyone had for a long time. And when that’s your only choice, that trauma monster you’ve tried to keep buried just eats and eats at you until you can’t take it anymore. Or…maybe we just need to update the old Nat King Cole lyrics? Personally I prefer the DMX version.