Smile
If you’ve been paying any attention to the horror movie scene lately then you’ll know that “elevated horror” is one of two genre sub-types blowing up right now (the other one is folk horror). The exact definition is a little blurry, as these things tend to be, but the general definition of what separates an elevated horror movie from normal horror movie is the following:
Novel hook
Focus on social issues, especially as metaphor
A24 logo on the poster
Vibes
That last one is important: more than anything else, you know an elevated horror movie when you see it…or rather, you can tell when someone is trying to make an elevated horror movie, even when they completely and utterly fail to do so.
For example,
Our protagonist is Rose Cotter, a hospital therapist who isn’t dealing too well with some serious childhood trauma brought on by her mother’s suicide. Another dose of trauma comes along to complicate things when one of Rose’s patients slits her throat in front of her, after claiming that she’s being stalked by an entity that disguises itself as the people around her, distinguished from real humans only by a malevolent grin. When Rose begins to see similar apparitions, she becomes convinced that the entity has attached itself to her–but to everyone around her, it seems that her unresolved trauma has simply broken her mind.
Right off the bat, horror fans will notice some similarities to other horror movies. The idea of a malevolent spirit passing from victim to victim is obviously reminiscent of It Follows, and the curse-style haunting that worsens progressively until it ends in its bearer’s death has shades of The Ring. (The director previously made a short movie serving as a prequel to this one, which is very clearly inspired by the famous Winkie’s scene from Mulholland Drive). The problem is that Smile’s haunting mechanics are just not as intuitive or as interesting. Here’s a comparison:
It Follows: You get cursed by having sex with someone who’s previously been cursed
The Ring: You watch a cursed videotape
Smile: You get cursed when someone else who has the curse kills themselves in front of you, which they eventually do because the smile-entity makes them do it, I guess, and also the smile-ghost tells you when you’re going to die which makes you more stressed out and then it has an easier time possessing you so it can make you kill yourself
Okay, I’m being a little disingenuous with my description of Smile’s premise, but I really do think it’s a failed attempt at capturing the same kind of one-sentence horror premise that made those other two movies so popular. The big difference between Smile and them is that in The Ring and It Follows, the victims are cursed by taking some sort of action (having sex, watching a video tape) which is on the face of it innocuous, but which ends up damning them. This adds an element of tragedy to the story– the idea that the protagonists could have avoided their fate if they had just done things a little differently. This is especially the case in The Ring, where the main character has been told about the legend of the cursed tape and even has credible reason to believe that there may be something to it, but still watches it anyway. In It Follows the main character doesn’t have any prior knowledge of the curse, but she gets it via having sex with a stranger in a dark, secluded location, something that is inherently kind of unwise to begin with (and indeed appears to go wrong in a much more realistic way before it becomes apparent what’s actually happening).
In Smile, the victims just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rose has no idea that the patient she encounters is anything out of the ordinary, nor is there anything she could reasonably have done to avoid being cursed. It sounds like a small difference, but in practice it takes away from the movie’s core conceit, which is a pretty severe blow for the movie to self-inflict so early on.
Once we finish with the setup and get into the scares, the movie has a chance to take a more promising direction. This sort of horror movie can struggle with how to generate the spooks, given that you can’t just have ghosts pop out and go booga-booga like in a James Wan movie. Movies like The Ring or It Follows typically rely on creating an atmosphere of dread as the curse closes in, and initially it seems like Smile is going for the same approach, quite effectively as well. There’s one really effective spook early on involving a phone call that got my hyped about the rest of the movie.
And then we get to the stupid jump scares where a ghost teleports beside Rose and goes “BWWAAAAAARRRGHH!”
What’s even worse is that the movie does actually feature one really creative and unique jump scare later on, but then we still get these jump scares that are intended solely to keep the audience awake in between scares. I’ve gotten used to horror movies that are just lazy trash from the opening minute; what really stings is a movie that is clearly capable of being something more, but then chooses not to be.
Even outside the scares, the movie is severely over-directed. Creepy music blares from the opening seconds to the last with very little let-up, and mundane shots of Rose driving down the road or traversing her house use swooping upside-down camera movements. This does at times conjure up an atmosphere of dread, but the viewer’s fear-receptors will quickly grow desensitized.
Smile’s plot is one of those scenarios where the protagonist is desperately trying to convince people around her that she’s telling the truth, even though she can’t provide any proof and her claims are so outlandish that anyone she confides in automatically assumes she’s having a psychotic break. This format is tricky, because you need to balance the protagonist making a sensible attempt at getting the information across with the information receiver having a justified reason for dismissing the protagonist’s claims, such that neither party seems like they’re being irrational for the sake of the plot.
It’s the former aspect where Smile trips up, as all of Rose’s attempts at telling people about the curse are conducted in full-on “I’m going to show up at your doorstep and wave gruesome pictures of crime scenes at you” mode, even though immediately afterwards she embarks on the next phase of the investigation into the smile entity in an entirely cool-headed and logical manner. It doesn’t come across like she’s behaving erratically as part of a general break-down brought on by the stress of her situation (which would be entirely justified), but rather like she’s slipping into Hollywood Mental Illness Mode just for these scenes, so that the movie can wave off Rose seeking assistance from anyone but her cop ex-boyfriend as unworkable.
Speaking of Hollywood Mental Illness, the movie’s treatment of the topic is…mixed.
Maybe this is just because I worked in a psychiatric hospital for five years, but the opening scenes depicting Rose at her day job really didn’t work for me. First off, the movie can’t seem to decide whether Rose is a therapist or a psychiatrist–she refers to herself as the former, but acts much more like the latter, and her boss’s name badge clearly identifies him as a psychiatrist. The confrontation between her and the Smile-victim that kicks off the whole movie takes place in a closed room, with just the two of them, even though the woman is having such a severe psychotic break that she was brought into the hospital strapped to a gurney. There’s also multiple objects in the room that could be easily repurposed as weapons (which is in fact what happens), and Rose isn’t wearing one of those personal alarm things, instead having to call for help on a big red emergency phone.
Granted, the place I worked at was a long-term rehabilitation facility in Ireland and not the psychiatric emergency department of a big American hospital, so maybe I’m nit-picking unreasonably here. It just didn’t seem very realistic to me.
More problematic is the fact that Smile wants to be about the sitgmatisation of mental illness (gotta have a social theme for that elevated horror cred), and its attempts to do this are completely cartoonish. Every single character except Rose has at least one conversation where they’re like “GUESS THOSE BASKET CASES SURE ARE PSYCHO AM I RIGHT FELLAS WAKA WAKA” and I’m sorry, but no one fucking talks like this. If you’re going to try to depict real-world prejudice or discrimination, you’ve got to make it seem true to life or else all of your characters will come across like moustache-twirling Captain Planet villains.
Not that this matters, because the whole mental illness angle doesn’t actually go anywhere. Instead we get a big finale where Rose fights a monster that I’m sure got all the practical effects fans horny, but which doesn’t do anything to satisfyingly wrap up Rose’s emotional arc or any of the movie’s themes.