This article contains spoilers for the movie Smile.Smile is the latest horror film to use metaphors pertaining to the darkest human emotions and experiences. This is director Parker Finn’s feature length debut (a kind of sequel to his short film Laura Hasn't Slept) and has proven to be quite a successful break into the industry. Even the marketing behind the production was unique, where actors attended major league baseball games and smiled directly in the camera behind home plate. This inventive advertising plan proved to be effective as the film made more than its budget back at the box office on opening weekend alone.
Smile follows Rose (played by Sosie Bacon), a doctor who witnesses the brutal suicide of a patient (Caitlin Stasey). Rose begins to notice a strange and horrifying pattern in occurrences as well as a mysterious smile on the face of those around her. The film also stars Jessie T. Usher as Rose’s fiancé Trevor, Kyle Gallner as her ex-boyfriend and police office Joel, and Kal Penn as her boss Dr. Morgan Desai.
The most notable and marketable factor taken from the film is the use of smiles themselves. In an interview with The Hollywood News, director Parker Finn discusses how he decided to utilize smiles in a horrifying way:
“I think there's a real strength in the inherent contradiction. I mean, as you said, they’re a symbol of friendliness, they’re also really primal and innate in us as human beings. I think we learned to smile as babies and so if I could take that and sort of, like you said, flip it on its head, and allow the evil in the film to wear a smile as a mask and teach the audience that it’s the promise of a threat and something very dangerous, I thought that might get under audience’s skin.”
The Masks in Smile
Smiling, as Finn describes, is a sort of mask that flips the welcoming nature of the natural gesture on its head. These characters, including Rose, are tormented by this seemingly invisible entity until their final moments. However, at their most vulnerable, their most tortured, they are left smiling. Finn is able to craft such scares and suspense with a very risky plot device.
Smiling, as seen in an unsuccessful film like Truth or Dare, has been seen onscreen before. However, Finn’s depiction of smiles works so well to further the metaphors behind smiling and the film’s curse in the first place. Smiling is used as a mask to cover the trauma behind the characters, and it represents how even though we might be smiling from ear to ear at times, there could be an enormous amount of hurt behind the mask.
Trauma in Smile
The big reveal in the film is the pattern uncovered by Rose and Joel as they discover the chain of events from victim to victim. Each suicide victim had previously seen someone else kill themselves right in front of them, and they begin to see the devilish grin in various places until it comes for them. It's almost as if the trauma
Trauma is very prevalent in this film. Rose, from the very beginning, is known to have experienced trauma as a child, seeing her mother overdose in front of her. That trauma is laced with guilt as she could have called for help in her mother’s dying moments — but chose not to. Rose is plagued with nightmares of that fateful childhood night and when she sees Laura, her patient, kill herself in a brutal way before her eyes, that trauma comes right back to haunt her.
The third act of the film is a visual representation of the attempt to overcome trauma. Rose goes back to her childhood home to confront this entity. In a terrifying fight with the smiling evil, she burns down her house. This was Rose’s way of erasing that trauma from her past and getting rid of the remnants of that night from her childhood. It is her mother that appears before her as the fully fleshed out entity, and it fights her nearly to death before it is engulfed in flames. However, Finn shows trauma as it really is.
Smile Shows That the Pain Doesn't End
After Rose’s victory over the entity, she returns to Joel’s apartment to find that she can never fully get rid of trauma. She never actually left the childhood home, and her mind had been irrevocably taken by this evil being. Joel busts down the door to her home only to find her smiling, covered in gasoline. Without a moment to hesitate, she burns herself alive before his eyes. The chain of events continues as Joel is now burdened with this horrifying curse.
This interpretation of trauma is as real as it can get. Horrifying things we see as humans can never really be erased or burned from our memories. However, overcoming that trauma and being brave enough to face it is the subtle positive message the film tries to convey through intelligent characters we much need in horror films today. Of course, Smile is honest about the actual success rate.
Rose in Smile
Rose is a prestigious doctor and is highly respected in her field. What makes her a great horror protagonist is her ability to analyze her situation and try to rationalize the irrational. What is happening to her is pure evil, and she is in denial about it for some time. She asks her psychiatrist to prescribe antipsychotic medication to stop hallucinations based on the traumatizing experience she witnessed with Laura. She also says that her condition might be due to lack of sleep and overworking.
Usually, in horror films, we see the protagonist try to convince people that what is happening to them is unnatural. On the other hand, we see Rose trying to convince herself that her experiences are purely cognitive and based on stress. Her decisions are rational, and we never have the “don’t go in the dark room” moment during this film. The evil presents itself in pure daylight and there is no escaping it. Rose is a great horror protagonist we fully relate to, and Sosie Bacon does a perfect job portraying her.
The Plot of Smile
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1500&dpr=1.5)
While we have seen the cursed horror trope many times before, Smile does it uniquely with fully set-up scares. Films like Gore Verbinski's The Ring, along with The Grudge, Relic, and The Conjuring have showcased curses being passed down and handed off to. But Parker Finn seems to truly appreciate this genre, making short films that have developed characters and practical effects, and takes the concept seriously by making it his own.
The film is filled with jump scares, but they never come off as cheap and out of place. The jump scares do pay off because what we are seeing is actually terrifying. The sound design accompanying the visuals is bombastic at times but gets us in the same frame of mind as our lead character, and the score is extremely distinctive and haunting. She is scared, so we are also scared.
Smile is one of the better horror films to have been released in the last few years. Parker Finn made a great studio horror flick based around his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept. It seems we have a new name in the horror movie world, alongside Ari Aster, Jennifer Kent and Robert Eggers. Audiences flocked to theaters to see Smile, and we wait in anticipation for what the director has coming next.