Say Cheese
‘Smile’ isn’t quite as new as it thinks it is, but it’s still a decent creeper that will have you wondering about the next grin you see on the mtr.
Smile
Director: Parker Finn • Writer: Parker Finn, based on his short film
Starring: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Caitlin Stasey, Jessie T Usher, Gillian Zinser, Rob Morgan, Kal Penn, Robin Weigert, Judy Reyes
USA • 1hr 55mins
Opens Hong Kong September 29 • III
Grade: B
You know how movie trends come and go, and it seems like for little stretches there’s just a gaggle of the same damn movie? The Vietnam War (or The American War depending on your geography) had a moment, with Platoon, Hanoi Hilton, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and a bunch of lesser titles all hitting at once. There were two killer asteroid movies back-to-back, two volcano movies, two slutty Vegas movies and so on. Then there are thematic or stylistic trends. Everyone was the next Tarantino for a while. The New French Extreme (Martyrs, Inside, High Tension) was a thing, and recently we’ve moved onto so-called “elevated horror” (The Witch, Midsommar, Relic, Hereditary), a gawdawful name that just means festival-friendly creeping terror rooted in psychology. One subject that often gets overlooked is trauma. Collective trauma, generational trauma, social trauma. All have been the basis for a rash of horror content of late, from all corners. Such is the case with Parker Finn’s Smile.
In Smile Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, and holy shit does she look like her mother, Kyra Sedgwick) is a doctor in an overloaded psychiatric ward of a public-ish hospital with unresolved trauma of her own that rears its head after a patient commits suicide in front of her. The patient, Laura (Caitlin Stasey), an otherwise balanced PhD student, witnessed her professor commit suicide, bearing an unnerving smile as he did. She started seeing things – weird smiling faces – stopped sleeping and got zero support. No one believed her, and the situation finally drove her to Cotter and her death.
That is super creepy
Rose tries to shake it off her very, very bad day at work with dinner with her fiancé Trevor (Jessie T Usher, The Boys’ A-Train) and her self-involved sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), who’s all about her white suburban mom first world problems. But Laura’s death is sticking with her, and she starts by snapping at Holly and dropping wine glasses, but soon enough she starts seeing the same weird phantoms the woman complained of.
To this point Smile is a lot of the same we’ve seen before, basking in oodles of horror tropes. Rose thinks stuff is lurking in dark corners, yet she never turns the lights on. She overreacts to harmless patient behaviours that gets her a stern talking to about some “time off” from the boss, here Dr Desai (Kal Penn). The fiancé waffles on his support and there’s an ominous pet. But as Rose unravels a pattern emerges, one straight out of Ring and It Follows, and before you know it she’s tapping her ex-boyfriend and cop Joel (discount Justin Trudeau, Kyle Gallner) for favours. He naturally becomes her only ally. Even Rose’s own therapist, Dr Northcott (always welcome Robin Weigert, Deadwood, Little Big Lies) becomes a threat.
It follows so you’re next
We knew Trudeau was an ham…
Despite a reliance on goofy jump scares and a heavy duty gimmick, Smile has a lot going for it. Rose’s mental hellscape is convincing, and Bacon makes her turn from righteous, defensive professional (“Did you just say headcase?”) to frantic, blathering madwoman almost palpable. She’s helped along by a disconcerting, peaceful pastel aesthetic courtesy of production designer Lester Cohen and a superb, dissonant score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer that juices the tension and makes the world collapsing in on Rose even more claustrophobic. For every moment Smile comes off as on the nose, it surprises with a narrative turn that’s bleaker than expected. Particularly grim, yet somehow realistic, is Rose and Holly’s fraught relationship. In a single, standout scene, the two women tear each other down for their choices – and how they have or have not parsed their common trauma. Both are assholes. Both are wrong. Both are right. And it’s this emotional thread that Finn weaves through the film that gives it a backbone. By the time Rose confronts her literal demons (which is heavily influenced by an unexpected, nasty twist) we’re ready for anything, even if she’s not. — DEK