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.
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
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