Smile: A Really Good Movie Trapped Inside A Very Average One

I’ve felt a lot of different things over the course of watching movies and writing about them. Fear, anxiety, dread, sadness, revulsion, even boredom, anger and disgust at the especially terrible movies, disappointment at the ones with promise that don’t quite get there. But I’ll be damned if I can remember the last time I walked away from a film feeling a mixture of frustration and confusion on top of everything else. Upon finishing a film I can usually gather my thoughts pretty easily and land on some kind of conclusion. What I liked, what I didn’t, what I thought worked, what didn’t, stuff like that.

But I cannot remember a time when a movie has left me as mixed-up and uncertain about what I just saw as Smile has. I guess if I were to be reductive I’d call it a mixed bag. For every piece of it that works, there’s something that doesn’t, and it fails with the same intensity with which it succeeds. So it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it but I can’t really dismiss it either, and if my dithering is annoying two paragraphs in, well, it ain’t gonna stop here.

The film opens cold on a face - a woman’s face, still, unblinking and insensate. The room is dim and very messy, laundry spilling out of hampers and a scattering of pills spilled out of bottles. A lot of bottles. The door opens, and there’s a little girl. And she sees this woman slumped over in bed, surrounded by so many empty pill bottles. And this is how this little girl discovers that her mother is dead.

The little girl is Rose Cotter, and she grows up to become a psychiatrist. She works at a hospital in emergency medicine. She wants to help people whose demons threaten to get the better of them, for whom life is a day-to-day proposition. She’s seen what happens when the demons win. And so, in the course of an otherwise routine day, she’s asked to do intake on a young woman named Laura. She’s a grad student, no previous history of mental illness, but she’s seeing things. Rose starts with the standard questions and Laura insists that she isn’t crazy. But Laura’s seeing something everywhere she goes. It looks like people she knows, but it’s not them. It wears their faces like a mask, and nobody else can see them. And they are smiling at Laura. Smiling so widely. Rose tries to reassure Laura that our mind can make us believe something that isn’t real absolutely is, and Laura becomes extremely upset because Rose isn’t listening, Rose doesn’t believe her. Rose can’t see the thing that is standing right behind her. But Laura can, and she starts screaming and backing away. Rose looks away long enough to call for assistance.

And when she looks back, Laura is standing there, very still. Smiling.

I think the best way I can describe this film is as one that succeeds and fails with equal intensity. It’s got a good foundation. The use of a smile as an indicator that Bad Things are about to happen is a great singular image. A smile is nice until it’s a little too wide, and held a little too long, at which point it’s unnerving. So that’s a great start. It’s narratively minimal, in that all you have to do is have someone smiling somewhere in the scene to convey dread. It’s nightmarish stuff in the best way, in that it’s a little cryptic, a little inexplicable, and can be absolutely anywhere in the scene. So this is the kind of film that doesn’t need to have too many moving parts. And narratively, it doesn’t - Rose witnesses something bloody and terrible, and finds herself plagued by nightmares, episodes of sleepwalking, and she starts seeing things. Her life starts to fall apart and she becomes increasingly obsessed with trying to figure out what’s happening.

And toward this end, one of the film’s biggest strengths is that it does a very good job of setting a tone early. Shattering glass is a recurring motif, and it’s a good analogy for the overall feeling of the movie as well. It’s something hard and brittle that fragments and splinters in the blink of an eye, leaving lots of sharp edges. It’s tense and nervy, using lots of close-ups and shots centered on a figure, drawing your eye to the middle of the frame in a way that feels confrontational. Holding close on people’s faces a little longer than you think can do a lot to elicit unease, and I have to say, the shot composition does a lot of good work in this regard. It does resort to the occasional jump scare, but just as often it gets the same effect from dramatic contrasts in cuts from one shot to another instead. The transitions can be whiplash-inducing, but that’s a feature, not a bug. There are nightmare sequences that come unexpectedly and seamlessly with waking life, and vary enough that you can never be sure of what’s coming. The soundtrack is mostly scratchy static, low-frequency swells, and queasy, wavering tones - it’s not subtle, and it’s not afraid of using stings to punctuate startling moments, but it doesn’t feel overdone, again, it feels confrontational somehow. It’s a film that is very much in your face, almost relentless in its insistence.

The performances are somewhat uneven, but Rose is a strong central character. She’s someone who’s pretty clearly driving herself too hard to try and outrun whatever haunts her, and that’s just where the movie starts. Once things go bad, she’s got no buffer for it, so she gets twitchier and more erratic as the film goes on. She handles her situation badly, which is realistic given what she’s witnessed. She’s a mess, which is exactly what you would be in her situation. Her decline is one of the most believable things in the film, one of the few times that the old “everyone thinks she’s crazy but the ghosts are real” cliché actually has some punch to it, because she’s so raw and because the character’s actually pretty developed - the way she immediately retreats and apologizes following any angry outburst is a nice touch given what happened to her as a child. It can be uncomfortable to watch in the best way.

I think a lot of its failures have a lot to do with not living up to its strongest moments, but more on that in a bit, because the messiest and most complicated thing about this movie is, for me, a big part of its central conceit. Its treatment of mental health…well, I’m really not sure how to parse it. There’s a strong reliance on other characters dismissing or trivializing mental illness - phrases like “nut case,” “head job,” and so on are thrown around so much and so glibly that they almost feel like a stylistic choice, and most of the people surrounding Rose range from baffled to callous on the subject. One way to read it is as being tremendously insensitive in general, a film about a psychiatrist and the supernatural presenting as mental illness made by someone with little appreciation for the gravity of the material. And there’s certainly plenty of precedent in horror - classic and contemporary - for exactly that, so that’s entirely possible.

But on the other hand, it’s only the laypeople in the film who talk that way, never the professionals, who are portrayed pretty reasonably. This paints the other characters as less sympathetic and frames them as being in the wrong here. As a result, the divide between what Rose is experiencing and how pretty much everyone else in her life handles it serves to alienate her further as the film goes on. So in that sense it could also be read as an attempt to illustrate how often issues around mental health aren’t taken seriously and how alone people suffering can feel. But it’s really tough to tell which is the case, so I sort of want to say it didn’t work. There’s also this idea of an evil spirit that feeds on trauma, and again that feels like an attempt at metaphor, at how trauma and pain get communicated generationally and passed on, that it is something that haunts you and people who haven’t experienced it will never be able to understand, and though I think that making it a literal monster isn’t a mistake thematically, I don’t think it really serves the movie well as a story because the literal monster is sort of underwhelming for the most part. It’s good to remember that what we don’t see can be even scarier than what we can. As soon as you put the monster up on screen, you threaten to fall short of what the audience has conjured up in their heads.

And that’s just one of a number of cinematic missteps here. As I said above, the use of smiles and smiling figures is potentially a powerful image but it ends up being really underutilized. There are attempts to build it in throughout, but they’re fitful enough that it never really builds up the kind of inescapable dread that it could. Characterization is a kind of all over the place - Rose is very believable, then others in her immediate orbit are a little less fleshed-out, and she has a sister and brother-in-law who, along with a detective, are almost literal cartoons. There’s a dinner with them and her fiancée that feels like it comes out of an entirely different movie, maybe a farce about suburban vanity. The dialogue is this odd mix of conversational and stagey, verging on speeches and monologues. Maybe the artificiality helps the overall tone insofar as the whole thing feels slightly unreal, like Rose is sort of seeing the world through the eyes of a trauma survivor and everything seems a little shallow and fake, but again I can’t tell if it’s a deliberate choice or not. I think if the performances had been consistently grounded or consistently artificial, either would have worked well, but bouncing from one to the other feels confusing.

And on top of that, it’s too long - this was not a story that needed to take almost two hours, and the third act suffers most in terms of feeling padded. It arrives at the end I assumed it would (rather than one I thought they were hinting at that could have been much creepier), and that by itself is okay, because handles well it could have been really powerful. But it took an unnecessary detour on the way there for a Final Girl moment, featuring a big speech that laid everything out too plainly, that told instead of showing, and coming at the same moment the monster becomes visible to us made it really, really on the nose. Nothing that happens in that sequence needed to be spelled out, and the monster was scarier when it was just someone smiling at you. But it keeps hammering away at the point. This extends to the filmmaking itself, which uses a few cinematic tricks a little too often. Like I said, there’s a lot of breaking glass, in this movie and as thematically and tonally apt as it is, it’s also frequent enough that it starts to verge on comical. There are also a lot of drone shots, which is fine, it’s becoming kind of a cliché, but whatever, but they include more than one where a long shot of someone driving or of a city skyline inverts itself. I don’t mind this as an effect, but don’t use it more than once, for pity’s sake. That it echoes films like The Ring and It Follows bothers me less than it did some critics, but along with overreliance on those other elements, it all does threaten to occasionally spill over into feeling assembled from parts. It never quite gets that bad, but it’s sort of on the radar, which isn’t great. And the pacing issues mean that the end itself doesn’t have the impact that it should. It feels anticlimactic, both because an attentive viewer saw where everything was going but then it took too long to get there, so it just lands with a thud.

Like The Night House - another film about loss and trauma embodied as monstrosity - it’s a film that suffers most when it underestimates its audience and feels the need to spell out stuff that doesn’t need to be spelled out. When it’s good, it’s really good, but when it fucks up it doesn’t fuck up by half measures. It’s a really good movie trapped inside of an aggressively average movie, and I can’t say for certain if the glimpses of something much better justify sitting through the really pedestrian stuff, but they’re certainly there..

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Night House: Dark Places

Ghost stories can be hard, haunted house stories can be hard, simply because there are so damn many of them. It’s tough to really do anything new with them because somebody, somewhere, has more likely than not assayed that territory already. It’s one of the oldest forms of horror there is, as soon as we had dwellings and communities we had the potential for stories about the long-passed people who once inhabited them. Hell, maybe even before that, I’m no anthropologist. The point is that it’s hard to do new stuff with ghosts, and so a lot of people don’t even try. Instead they just set up the location, insert some interchangeable characters, arrange some jump scares, and as often as not, make bank.

Which is probably a big part of why I’m still thinking about The Night House a few days after watching it. It’s a thoughtful and effective (albeit uneven) story about grief and the things we keep secret, and it manages to give one of the oldest stories in town some real heft and substance along the way.

It begins with a series of placid exterior and interior shots of a lovely modern lakeside home. There’s a boat bobbing gently in the water next to a dock, wind chimes clink in the breeze, Inside, the house is still, empty. It’s captured in the middle of everyday life, glasses sitting on a nightstand, pictures of a couple, pictures of friends and family. A home office, filled with drafting equipment. No sudden blaring shock disturbs it. Nothing sinister, nothing ominous. It’s just quiet. And then two women walk up to the front door, glimpsed from inside the house. There are murmured sympathies and reassurances, expressions of polite gratitude. One woman walks into the house while the other leaves.

The woman who walks into the house is Beth Parchin, and she’s just come back from a funeral. Her husband Owen has passed away suddenly, and Beth is left to try and pick up the pieces. He was an architect, he designed their home, and by all accounts he loved Beth very much. And Beth loved him. So we’re introduced to her at the moment when all of the well-meaning, sympathetic people have fallen away and it is just her in their house, without him.

And then she hears the footsteps upstairs, sees the muddy footprints that come right up to the front door.

In Owen’s absence, Beth finds herself beset by vivid nightmares that she finds hard to separate from waking life, and she’s started sleepwalking. She’s hearing someone in the house when she’s alone, and the circumstances around his death are leading her to wonder who her husband really was. She starts piecing the Owen she didn’t know together from his books, his diaries, the files on his computer and on his phone. And the longer she looks, the stranger it gets. This is the kind of film that might be called “stylish,” because a lot of it takes place in lovely modern interiors that don’t seem especially foreboding. Even nighttime exteriors in spooky forest settings are spooky forest settings at the edge of a pretty lake in upstate New York. And I appreciate the departure from cliché. It’s always nice to see a haunted house story where the house doesn’t look like the kind of place that’d be haunted, because there’s something so much more unnerving about ghosts in a place that looks like where we might live.

But it’s not just a modern take on a stock ghost story, at its heart there’s a strong commitment to exploring the emotional aftermath of someone’s death, and the idea that maybe we didn’t know that person as well as we thought. That there were other sides to them. It’s told with a strong use of silence and empty spaces, putting the idea of absence at the center of the film, and uses distortions of place and shape to communicate not just emotional states but also the supernatural in terms of absence and emptiness. Parallels and mirror images are a big part of the story too, which makes sense because in the wake of an unexplained death, the familiar can become strange, and that strangeness only deepens the more Beth explores what her husband’s life was like in the spaces she never knew about. So in some ways, that idea that we don’t ever truly know one another, no matter how intimate our relationship, is turned into something bigger and darker but does so in a way that isn’t necessarily obvious. It’s a ghost story, and it’s not not a ghost story, but that’s not where it ends, and it’s the story of someone who was keeping a dark secret, and it’s not not that story, but the secret both is and isn’t what you think it is. And it’s a story where the antagonist is something both literal and metaphoric, a fable about unresolved trauma and grief like The Babadook (though it’s really nothing like it otherwise and The Babadook is still easily the superior film overall). We experience Beth’s grief as grief and as something worse, more monstrous, as profound grief can often be. A grief that is taking form and pushing its way into our world.

The filmmaker’s approach is a very restrained one, and I think it works well, especially when so many mass-market horror films distributed by big studios go big and noisy and as obvious as possible. The palette is full of muted colors - this is mostly a tastefully earth-toned film - even in exteriors that are somewhat overcast without being brooding. It’s a surprisingly warm film visually, given the subject matter, and again, I think this works because it contrasts with the supernatural elements. This is someone’s home, and there’s something very wrong here. The score (where there is any, like I said, this is a film that uses silence a lot) is mostly ambience with the occasional sting and a well-deployed use of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “The Calvary Cross” as a leitmotif that brings grief and horror together. The dialogue is a little stagey in places, but strong performances across the board go a long way toward smoothing that over. Beth is especially well-realized as someone whose sorrow is matched only by her rage, and both shine through incandescently .She is not handling any of this well, she is lashing out and falling apart. On balance, she’s not even sympathetic in places but she’s absolutely raw and present throughout. And in the face of someone who feels totally alone, the importance of relationships and connection is made clear with the people around her, providing something of a lifeline for Beth as things get much worse. There’s anger, there’s pain, there’s sadness, there’s loss, and all of it to a degree that feels barely containable without being histrionic or exaggerated.

But it is uneven, and in the middle of a lot of good, thoughtful, substantial work there are moments that are entirely too conventional. The first act leans a little too much into what film critic Mark Kermode would call “quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-BANG!” filmmaking, not quite to the point of gratuitous jump scares, but things happen suddenly with sharp musical stings a little too often in spots where letting something unfold quietly in the background would have elicited more dread. And in the third act, the climax lays everything out a little too plainly, especially considering how much of it an attentive viewer has already put together at that point. It’s always annoying when a filmmaker doesn’t trust their audience to put two and two together. But none of this really fucks anything important up and it ends on a nice, uneasy note that manages to be both cathartic and sinister, avoiding a pat ending without feeling like sequel bait. We all have dark places we don’t like to go, this film says, but they are always there, and sometimes we have to.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu

Tourist Trap: Uncanny

The “uncanny valley” refers to the idea that after a certain point, an approximation of human features begins to elicit uneasiness and revulsion - things below this point don’t have this effect because they’re recognizably non-human, and things above this point are effectively indistinguishable from human, but there’s a point where something looks human enough that you want to process it as human, but it’s non-human enough that you recognize that you shouldn’t, and this is perceptually queasy. The word “uncanny” itself can be defined as “mysterious, arousing superstitious dread, uncomfortably strange.”

And Tourist Trap, at its best, works both of these angles. It’s an oddity from the days before the rules of slasher films were really codified, and though it’s not especially nuanced, fits a few different ideas together awkwardly and only works in fits and starts, it’s an interesting take on the genre and not really like anything else I’ve seen.

We start off with a guy rolling a tire down a dirt road (like you do), arriving at a gas station. He goes inside, but there’s no attendant, and it’s clearly been deserted for some time. He goes poking around the back, looking for someone to assist him, but only finds a small room with a bed and what appears to be someone sleeping. When he tries to wake them, it becomes clear that it’s a mannequin that’s been posed in the bed. And, well, that’s not weird at all. And then the mannequin starts to move, things get lethally weird, and the young man dies before we can even learn his name.

His name, as it turns out, is (or was) Woody, and he was trying to get air for a spare tire because he and his friends Jerry, Molly, Eileen and Becky got a flat tire while they were driving through a remote stretch of what appears to be southern California. The rest of the gang wonders what’s taking Woody so long, and slap the temporary tire on their care in an effort to get to a phone. They see a sign for “Slausen’s Lost Oasis” and follow it, expecting the usual underwhelming natural feature and tacky gift shop, but instead find this legitimately nice green spot in the desert, complete with waterfall and swimming hole. Soon enough they meet Mr. Slausen himself, who explains that the “oasis” is closed, has been closed ever since the new highway came through and business dried up. But he’s amicable enough, albeit a little odd, and invites them back up to his house for a beverage while he helps Jerry work on the car. As it turns out, Mr. Slausen lives in what used to be the main attraction of the oasis - a wax museum - while his brother Davey lives in the nearby house. He tells them not to bother Davey.

He also has a lot of mannequins.

The basic story is nothing especially complicated. You’ve got your requisite teens who aren’t aware that they’ve stumbled into big trouble, and they get picked off one by one. This isn’t really spoiling anything, it’s clear right away what kind of movie it is. But that’s in the broad strokes, and what I think makes this movie interesting is in the details it uses to paint those strokes. This film came out after early proto-slasher films like Halloween and Black Christmas, but before things started getting really formulaic. And so this film pulls from things like Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Psycho in equal measure without necessarily ripping any of them off outright - or, for that matter, being as good. The end result is something that in some ways is very much your stereotypical slasher movie (teens in trouble) and in some ways something very different, and that difference makes for an intermittently unsettling viewing experience. A big part of this is down to the use of mannequins and waxworks - figures that are human in their features but clearly not alive, and so when they do come alive (as they do in the opening scene, which also uses sound and silence in a surprisingly effective manner), it’s disconcerting. There’s a mechanical, gape-jawed clumsiness to some of them, and others seem like regular mannequins…until their eyes start to move. The intersection of life and lifelessness on display is exactly the uncanny valley, before the term entered regular usage.

And this extends from the story into the way the film itself is constructed. The whole thing feels…fractured, somehow. It sort of jumps one from scene to another without a lot of narrative transition. But sometimes that works for it - you’ve got a group of people who stumble onto this weird little out-of-the-way setting, isolated from everything else, filled with mannequins and the choppiness of the film evokes a half-glimpsed, half-remembered feeling, like the sort of movie we might conjure up in our dreams, or remember waking up in the middle of after dozing off, as our still-asleep brain struggles to make sense of what it’s seeing on screen and not quite putting the pieces together correctly. The score, especially during the opening credits, bounces between your standard ominous minor-key strings and something jauntier, more playful. It’s kind of the musical equivalent of a haunted toy, or a funny clown hiding a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, and given that we’re dealing with sinister inanimate figures, that seems entirely appropriate. And there is a decent amount of atmosphere - the locations are believably shabby and decaying like you’d expect a long-neglected tourist attraction to be, and though the performances are largely unremarkable, there are a number of moments that range from low-key uneasy to downright creepy.

But that’s when it works. There are more than a few places where it doesn’t. The off-kilter feeling extends to the pacing, as if the filmmakers realized too late that picking off all of these characters was the entire deal and so they have to spread them out so the movie isn’t just 45 minutes long. There are stretches of the antagonist monologuing that have an effectively off-putting strangeness to them but seem largely devoid of tension, and the third act drags out way too long with a minimum of actual action. And though the protagonists aren’t actively obnoxious, they are people who cannot leave well enough alone. Someone tells them not to do something, it becomes the first thing they do. And in this way it’s very much like the template for slasher films to follow -  a bunch of young people on vacation getting picked off one by one because they consistently make the worst decisions they can, going beyond suspension of disbelief into naked contrivance, with a killer who seems to be able to be everywhere at once.

It does end pretty strongly though, getting back to the half-awake nightmare vibe and finishing on an extremely creepy freeze-frame (a technique I wouldn’t mind seeing come back) that feels like the hook to a good ghost story. But for as much that’s here that you don’t see every day, there’s also a lot that we will come to see way too much in all of the films that came afterward, That place between the unfamiliar and too familiar is, itself, an uncanny valley.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi