Smile

dir: Parker Finn

2022

Smile, despite being extremely mediocre, has been one of the most successful films of 2022. Not just horror films, but, like, all films. And I mean in terms of return on investment versus overall box office returns.

I know, you’re right, no sane person who isn’t paid to worry about these kinds of things would expend any energy thinking about them let alone writing about them.

But then I never claimed to be that sane.

The reason why it makes me shake my head in wonderment is a) it’s mediocre even by the standards of mediocre horror flicks b) it’s quite generic and c) it was 100 times more successful than the main horror flick it rips off, being It Follows.

It Follows, which is a much better horror flick, was made for a fraction of Smile’s budget ($1.3 mill versus $17mill), but made $23.3mill at the box office, versus the $200mill plus that Smile made.

That seems so unfair, but that is the way of the cinematic world. Some films, no matter their dopiness, just hit audiences differently.

This has such a simple premise. People, or some kind of entity, smiling creepily. That’s it, that’s all you need. Much easier to create creepy posters and creepier advertising with people smiling in a manner that would make the Joker uncomfortable.

And before anyone actually emails me after crunching the above numbers, yes, I ran the calculations as well, and it turns out the ROI on It Follows was actually higher than Smile’s, despite it earning 10 times more. So I have no idea what point I was trying to make.

Oh yeah, this shitty film. That’s not fair; it’s not a shitty flick, it’s just not that good.

It does have an interesting premise, to an extent. The main character Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a psychiatrist who works at a psych hospital, and I don’t think she’s very good at her job. We never actually see her, throughout the flick, do anything to indicate she’s good at her job.

But at least we get the sense that she cares about patients in general, that’s a good start. She sees one patient, doesn’t really do anything for him. But the next one that comes in, whose smile graces all the posters for this flick, well, she’s a real peach.

She, being Laura (Caitlin Stasey) saw her university lecturer kill himself in front of her, and now she sees a smiling entity wherever she goes. And now, of course, she has a gift to give Dr Rose, as she proceeds to smile a lot and then kill herself in front of her.

See, problem for Rose is, this isn’t the first time she’s seen someone die in front of her. She saw her mother die by her own hand. That can be quite traumatising for a child, one would imagine. It could even be the kind of formative trauma that derails the course of someone’s life.

The terrible impact of having a loved one die when you feel like you should have done something to save them, and didn’t, could be so enormous that it ruins your life and the lives of the people around you. It could even be used as the dumb premise of a very dumb film.

Don’t get me wrong, most horror movies are dumb. They don’t need to be intelligent. They need to be visceral – attacking us on a primal level, tapping into our deepest fears. This movie keeps using the language of trauma and survivor guilt and… does practically nothing with it, other than to repeat itself continuously.

If this were a thriller, I would have cared whether Rose survived or not. I did not. I think I resented the flick for its casual, some might even say wholly inappropriate use of suicide and survivor guilt as a lynchpin for its premise, though admittedly I probably wouldn’t have minded so much if it had done something a bit more interesting with it.

Instead of gasping or feeling shocked at any of the jump scares or out of nowhere kills or deaths or ugly reveals, most of the time I was rolling my eyes, and occasionally I laughed outright, though I don’t think the laughs were intended (by the filmmakers, I mean – my laughter is always unintended and never appropriate).

The flick also unwisely follows down a path of gaslighting the central character, when it really doesn’t need to. She doesn’t need to be seen as “crazy” by her family or friends for this to be scary. Gaslighting has been a common technique in thriller and horror flicks for decades before it took on this misogynistic and controlling usage – it just used to be that the protagonist wouldn’t be believed about the plot machinations occurring around them by any of the other characters until the climax, where all is revealed, or they’re revealed to be the killer, and almost everyone is dead.

Here Rose is depicted as being “crazy” AND there’s something going after her randomly and the people around her and none of it seems like it’s going to make any difference. That can work too (in other movies), but not here it seems.

The Ring, whether the Japanese original or the remakes, introduced a lot of audience members to the contamination, or contagion theory of horror, where a person, instead of being possessed by a demon or some kind of evil entity like in the good ol’ days, could contract it through technology, like from watching a forbidden VHS tape, or receiving a phone call.

And it also used the idea that you could somehow pass the infection on to someone else if you did a particular thing, or got someone else to contract it, but you only had a short period of time else you’d be dead too. Some flicks would adhere to this literally (like It Folllows which made it a literally sexually transmitted contagion), or, like here, metaphorical (trauma begets trauma – if you traumatise a third person, they are chased by the entity). But it also doesn’t matter.

These rules aren’t made in order to make the story logical – they’re put there to keep the characters spinning their wheels, thinking that they can survive through logic, when the thing they’re fighting is pure malevolence, pure irrationality, pure chaos. And they might live if there’s going to be a bunch of crappy sequels, but usually they’re meant to die, because the thing they’re facing just doesn’t care about rules and rituals, just about destroying more people.

Smile, in tandem with being a mostly dull looking and visually unappealing movie, doesn’t do much with what it’s got, and has a pretty unremarkable script to go along with everything. Conversations are deadly in this flick, and no line of dialogue is more than predictable or rote.

It’s a rote, formulaic exercise that takes no joy or risks with the formula, and does nothing to push it in new or interesting directions.

Anyhoo, other people might enjoy it in my place. Maybe if they smile a bit more, go on, give us a smile.

5 reasons the first five minutes of the film work better than the next two hours out of 10

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“Ever since that patient I’ve been seeing and hearing things. When they happen they’re so corporeal and unsettling” – the real horror is in the screenwriting - Smile