Mark Reviews Movies: SMILE (2022)

Smile, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 29, 2022

Writer/director Parker Finn takes a pretty silly idea seriously in Smile, the filmmaker's debut feature. That's commendable, to be sure, as this horror story, about a malicious entity that feeds off a cycle of violence and trauma, tries to be about something more than mere scares. That Finn ultimately relies on a bunch of tried and tired tactics, instead of directly dealing with the assorted themes and ideas that are both on and just beneath the surface of this tale, gets in the way of that slightly deeper point.

Finn certainly gives an initial impression that his movie isn't going to so easily fall into such traps. The setup scenes are patient and haunting, as we witness a memory of the aftermath of an apparent suicide from the past before jumping ahead to the present day. Our protagonist is Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a therapist working difficult, lengthy shifts at an emergency unit for mental health crises. One patient, an apparent regular, arrives repetitively mumbling a string of memento mori, and as he points out that everyone—himself and the doctor included—is going to die in a scene of sterile stillness, the movie undoubtedly sets both a mood and a pace that feel oppressive.

The big moment, though, comes from Laura (Caitlin Stasey), a patient who arrives at the unit just as Rose is about to head home from another overnight shift. Duty calls, so the good doctor answers. She's rewarded with a woman who claims to see some mysterious figure—a supernatural being that wears masks, as she describes it, of friends or strangers or dead loved ones.

Laura witnessed a grisly death by suicide less than a week ago (A professor of hers bludgeoned himself with a hammer), and as Rose tries to help the patient make and comprehend the connection between her trauma and her apparent hallucinations, the woman is terrified by something—that thing—in the room. Obviously, the climax to the scene is the woman's suicide, smiling—just as the man whose death she recently witnessed did—the whole time.

One need only take this moment, as well as later photographs and a video of other suicides caused by this supernatural entity, to see through any notion that Finn genuinely wants to examine, understand, or sympathize with mental illness. The unknown being gives the material some distance from reality and, hence, transforms everything surrounding it—from trauma, to mental health, to suicide—into part of the gimmick.

As a gimmick, though, the material does have some potential and, depending on how matters evolve, room to grow into something as sincere and severe as Finn's approach. As for how the story actually unfolds, Rose soon discovers that, like Laura and the professor before her, witnessing that suicide has cursed her in some way.

She starts seeing visions—mostly Laura's smiling visage standing in the shadows—and losing track of time—finding herself in the middle of the street, for example, with no memory of how she ended up there. The curse quickly interferes with her work (Kal Penn plays the boss who'd ask for her badge if she had one), her shaky bond with elder sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), and her relationship with fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher), who worries she's losing her mind like her mother—the dead woman from the prologue—before her.

Most of this is a game—and a fairly familiar one at that. The plot has Rose, with the aid of her police detective ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), tracing the curse back from Laura, to the professor, and to others who were traumatized by a violent suicide and continued on to the same fate. Finn definitely makes the underlying emotional and psychological issues—trauma, guilt, grief, self-destructive feelings—into a key part of the story, but framing all of these ideas within the scope of some supernatural horror tale puts a limit on how much we can take them seriously inside the story itself.

Beyond that, the actual implementation of these ideas is pretty predictable and filled with plenty of cheap trickery. Despite what we might infer from the unhurried pace of the narrative, Finn isn't above easy and telegraphed jump-scares, which arrive within suspense sequences that fit a formulaic sense of rhythm.

We see Rose looking at a space, for example, and the camera takes her perspective of some empty room. When the camera cuts back to her, Rose is immediately startled by some screaming, grabby thing behind her. Such is a pattern that's repeated a few times (One sequence that has her staring at a computer screen before something just pops into howling existence out of nowhere is especially egregious).

At its best, Smile is filled with foreboding and unnerving potential, guided by a filmmaker who seems to care about more than attempting to scare us. That, unfortunately, is only the first act of this movie, which becomes a routine machine of frights in the second act, before making a literal monster of grief and trauma in a third act that fully reveals the whole thing as just a gimmick.

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