“I’m a PhD candidate, I’m not some lunatic,” Laura says as she sits across from Dr. Rose Cotter in an improbably chic therapy room of an emergency psychiatric ward in Newark, New Jersey. Days earlier, Laura had witnessed a professor at her college commit suicide by bashing his head in with a hammer. Since then, she claims she’s been followed by a presence that manifests itself in “normal people” in order to take control of her life. These manifestations are distinguished by the uniformly inhuman grin on their faces. Dr. Cotter processes this account as she’s done so many times in her career, with a combination of earnest empathy and the self-assurance that she can help this clearly but unremarkably disturbed woman. Then Laura is thrown back into what appears to be a seizure. As Dr. Cotter calls for help, she is seen again standing still, bearing an unsettling Cheshire Cat smile. With a shard of a smashed vase, she slits her own throat, the facial expression entirely static even after she collapses dead and bleeding on the floor. The scene is paced in so arresting a fashion that I’d completely forgotten that the title sequence had not even run yet.
Parker Finn’s debut feature Smile has been praised more for its execution than for its originality. And the praise is warranted. Smile carries itself with an almost strategic approach to scaring its audience that belies the novice status of its director. Every detail is arranged as if by a sequence of triggers, and with an impressive versatility of fucked-upness, resulting in one of the most consistently frightening films I’ve seen in many years. So much so that I was left wondering how much work went into its primary effect: that grin which had to be replicated identically across different facial types1 and character personalities.
Yet failing all that, the critics tell us, Smile is but an echo of superior ancestors, namely It Follows and The Ring, with a bit Drag Me to Hell thrown in for spice. This is not untrue as such; Smile’s concept seems at first crudely straightforward in a way that can only be seen as derivative. Still, the criticism is less warranted than the praise. Leaving aside the fact that the “cursed woman in trouble” trope dates back to at least “The Yellow Wallpaper,” horror hasn’t really had an original idea since Lovecraft took its soul away, and the only response lately (a feeble one at that) has been to put it, or something close to it, back. This is not a demerit. Until humans ascend to a higher plane of consciousness, they will be scared by the same things. Smile’s scares, to return from this digression, are at once timely and timeless, and delivered in a brutal fashion not seen in a major-market horror since Sinister a decade earlier. Indeed, the words I have to offer here will do it dismal justice.
Sosie Bacon’s Rose is a psychiatrist with a savior complex. Haunted by the suicide of her mother when she was a child, on which the film brazenly opens, Rose is not beneath giving cost-free treatment to repeat, uninsured patients and working 80 hours a week for thankless pay. (Though it must be said she lives quite well with her fiancé in what I’m guessing is Morris County.) This charitable, workaholic impulse undoes her with the above scene that shows not only the limits of her own abilities but places her closer to her patients’ point-of-view than she’d probably thought possible. In addition to the typical trauma of watching someone die, Rose begins to take on the “delusions” that Laura described. These come first as unnerving but slight reverberations on the edge of her sight that are easily rationalized by her own professional criteria. She even seeks her own former therapist to get a prescription for effects she thinks are purely stress-induced.
Soon the delusions gain in frequency and intensity that suggest more than mental distress. The grinning face comes out of the periphery and appears anywhere: on her patients, on a wine mom at a birthday party, on her sister. They come in phantom phone calls, tripped security systems, sudden fugue states, and memory lapses. And here the film follows the expected formula. Rose and her detective ex discover a pattern of brutal suicides, a kind of trauma chain in which the dead pass the condition onto the only living witnesses. And as the seasoned viewer might expect, the method of escape only diverts the chain and still at great cost to the one escaping. Stopping it is more drastic and not foolproof.
Smile is not perfect. It makes choices in the final act, such as personifying the entity itself, that I found not nearly as effective as the lead-up and which also confuses what I thought was an otherwise coherent and devastating depiction of mental illness and a meditation on the ways in which we misunderstand mental illness.
I use “mental illness” advisedly, for it is worth distinguishing from words such as “lunatic,” “crazy,” and “unhinged,” used interchangeably with the former throughout the film. The characters afflicted with the entity are not crazy. What they endure is real enough, but to say that it is distinct from an illness is something else entirely. For just as it is clear they are not crazy, it is equally clear that they are mentally unwell.
I frame this only by what I’m given by the film. Smile prefers to present the entity rather than to explain it. We know mostly that it is a something of a psychic contagion, spread through and powered by trauma. It is not clear whether it can sense specifically traumatized people to inhabit or if it can detect trauma in its victims like toys in a box. I’m guessing it can do both. But once it has its hold on you, it fully integrates into your life and memories. It is perhaps a clever trick on the entity’s part that its effects are indistinguishable from most mental instability. Rose is driven to disturbing extremes under its influence that harm not only herself but those she cares about. It tricks her into restraining a patient who is not threatening her. Her strained relationship with her sister is all but ruined when, unbeknownst to her until she sees it, she gifts her nephew with her murdered cat. The entity also acts more subtly by triggering Rose’s physical tics (like biting her thumb until it bleeds) and provoking outbursts of brutal candor toward her family.
A communication breakdown inevitably ensues in which Rose’s diagnostic rationales are put back on her. Her own assertions of an invasive presence (she is careful not to say “ghost”) are less compelling to her loved ones and coworkers than overwork or genetic inheritance. This suggests to them that what she’s inflicted with is easily categorized and treated, if only she understood; but perhaps more importantly it provides a certain comfort to those rendering the diagnosis. Because even with greater inclusivity and empathy, the gap between mental illness as something categorized and mental illness as something experienced has not narrowed. In fact it may well have widened in the era of self-care and self-diagnosis. Smile is most effective when demonstrating this gap and bringing the viewer as close to the experience side of the gap as cinematic technique, dramatic craft, and allegorical storytelling are able.
This comes with significant, possibly controversial, tradeoffs. If Rose’s condition can, in some knotted-up manner, be seen as mental illness, it is unlike any mental illness we know of. It has all the visible traits of mental illness, with all the familiar stresses and strains on sufferer and witness. Once inflicted on someone, it has access to that person’s specific experiences and sensory limitations. It knows them as sometimes only mental illness can know someone. Yet it is also viral, and fatal. Even escaping it (as distinct from surviving it, which no one does) means playing by its exacting rules. Moreover, there is no treatment for it. By placing so much emphasis on the intensity of mental suffering, Smile does few favors for the utility of therapy, especially in a time when “going to therapy” is an important signaling device. In addition to being expertly frightening and appallingly violent, Smile is a film bereft of hope. It has all the “humanist” elements of a Mike Flanagan Netflix series but none of the bedtime-story-for-adults escape hatches that instill so much fawning in it.
This is not to say that Smile is making a definitive case for or against anything. It is, after all that, a horror movie, and a pretty good one. Horror, good or bad, is not obligated to be therapeutic or kind or to make viewers, in Flanagan’s typically maudlin rhetoric, “braver,” let alone to be polemical. Horror’s only obligation is to take me seriously. From there, horror is free to broach any topic of existence that falls short of acceptability in more literal-minded conversation: such as the reality that hope is sometimes a luxury, and systems for easing hopelessness are, even now, not always functional or compassionate.
Now that horror’s recent flights of credibility appear to be leveling off, as they tend to do after a time, those non-literal conversations may become less frequent but also less monotonous. A film at once as popular and as low-key as Smile feels like a conversation in secret, among trusted interlocutors capable of thinking through and not just perversely reveling in the extremes they endure. And a film that refines its methods as the narrative dictates, rather than the mandarins of the “mythic text,” is a trustworthy conversation-accelerant. Horror is best lit only by fire.
I’m not ruling out an intense cult following arising among physiognomy freaks.