Director: Parker Finn Screenplay: Parker Finn Cast: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Caitlin Stasey, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert, Kal Penn Year: 2022
"Smile" opened in 2022 to very strong reviews and I, for one reason or another, kept letting it slip past me until recently. Now that I've finally seen it, I can say the reputation is earned, and that what interested me most wasn't so much the scares as what sits underneath them. Read the way I read it, the film is a metaphor for trauma and mental illness, above all depression, and for our habit of hiding all of it behind a smile while it slowly eats away at us.
In "Smile" we follow Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a hospital therapist who takes an emergency session with Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey), a patient in a near-psychotic state who insists something is following her and showing up wearing other people's faces. The session ends in a traumatic incident right in front of Rose, and from that moment it's Rose who starts experiencing exactly what the patient described. Something follows her, hides from her or appears wearing the face of someone she knows, and it always shows up with a deeply unsettling smile.
What makes the character interesting is that Rose, because of her job, knows exactly what mental illness looks like and is surrounded by it every day, and yet she has buried her own for years. There is also a family history the film keeps present without ever fully addressing, one that suggests part of what's happening to her may have been inherited. That idea of what passes from one generation to the next puts "Smile" in conversation with films like "Hereditary", although Finn handles it with far more restraint and prefers to leave it hanging.
The premise, admittedly, isn't entirely new. To some extent it reminded me of "It Follows", with an entity that latches onto a person and torments them relentlessly until it finishes them. Where "Smile" finds its own path is in what that entity stands for, as once we read it as mental illness, we watch it gain strength little by little until it consumes the person completely, to the point of driving them to do things they aren't even aware of. The blurring of what's real and what isn't adds a lot to that reading, since the viewer is never quite sure of what they're seeing and ends up as disoriented as Rose.
The performances are very good overall, though there were a few specific moments I found hard to buy. Sosie Bacon leads the cast as Rose, alongside Kyle Gallner ("Ghosts of War", "The Cleansing Hour") as Joel, but the one who walks away with the film is Caitlin Stasey as Laura. Her presence and her smile are what carry the unsettling atmosphere through the rest of the runtime, and every time the entity reappears, something of her is still there. It's this character who gives the film's horror its weight.
My only reservation is the length. At 115 minutes it felt a little long to me, and I think there were stretches that could have been trimmed without losing anything, though it never really damages the pacing, because the film stays entertaining throughout.
"Smile" is a very good and very entertaining film that takes a familiar premise and turns it into a carefully built metaphor for mental illness, even if it can be hard to watch at times. I don't know whether that was Parker Finn's intention, and this is my own interpretation, but it's a reading the film sustains from start to finish. Anyone who enjoyed "It Follows" or psychological horror that takes its time will get a lot out of it, while those looking for something lighter, or who would rather not face subjects like depression and suicide, should know going in that the film doesn't soften them.
Rating: 8/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
Searching for answers, Rose discovers that Laura wasn't the first, since Laura herself had witnessed her professor's suicide, and that behind her lies a chain of cases in which every witness ends up taking their own life, smiling, within a week. The investigation leads to the one exception in that chain, Robert Talley (Rob Morgan), whom they visit in prison. He tells them the entity feeds on trauma, and that the only way out is to brutally kill someone in front of a witness so the curse passes to them, which is exactly what put him behind bars.
From there Rose understands she has only two options, to die herself or to kill someone else in front of a witness. Refusing to pass the curse on to anyone, she goes back alone to her mother's abandoned house, convinced that if she isolates herself no one can witness her death and the curse will end with her, and that house is also where her own problems began. There the entity appears to her in the shape of her mother, and it comes out that Rose could have saved her and chose not to. In the struggle Rose starts a fire and seems to have destroyed the entity, but her escape turns out to be another illusion. The entity shows her its true form, crawls inside her and possesses her, and Rose douses herself in fuel and sets herself on fire just as Joel, who had tracked her to the house, breaks down the door.
Joel becomes the witness to that death, the curse passes to him and the cycle continues. If we hold on to the mental-health reading, the ending is as cruel as it is coherent, since Rose tries to carry what is consuming her alone, isolating herself in the place where it all started, and that is exactly where the guilt she had spent years hiding catches up with her. Trauma isn't destroyed with one decisive gesture, and damage left untreated ends up reaching whoever is standing closest.
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