One could be forgiven for being sick to death of contemporary horror cinema’s fixation on threading trauma through the prism of allegory. Which makes it all the more impressive that Parker Finn, in his feature-length directorial debut, is able to mine a rich vein of emotive pain and despair without sacrificing an inch of Smile’s spooky sense of fun.
Psychologist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is used to treating patients who suffer from extreme psychosis, but an incident resulting in the death of a PhD student, Laura (Caitlin Stasey), who believed that she was being pursued by a specter that “wears people’s face’s like masks” leaves her shaken. After being put on paid leave, Rose is beset by unpredictable and terrifying visions that threaten her already strained relationships with her sister (Gillian Zinser) and fiancée (Jessie T. Usher). In desperation, she turns to policeman and former flame Joel (Kyle Gallner), who helps her investigate the bizarre entity and the trail of mutilated bodies it’s left in its wake.
Based on Finn’s 2020 award-winning short Laura Hasn’t Slept, Smile dexterously threads the needle between splashy, FX-heavy set pieces and fine-grained character work. And though the film takes more than a few pages from early-2000s J-horror, its somber gloss is more reminiscent of that regional boom’s American remakes, such as Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, Jim Sonzero’s Pulse, and Eric Valette’s One Missed Call. Its urban legend-inspired conceit also has more than a little bit of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows in its DNA.
All of this is to say that everything Smile is doing is familiar enough at this point to be considered old-fangled, but the striking precision of its craft sloughs away any sensations of déjà vu. The filmmakers use shallow-focus photography and place their actors at the dead center of the frame to unnerving effect, as in as the opening scene where Rose witnesses a smiley-faced Laura’s self-mutilation, her blood filling the frame while Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score thrums with menace, discordant burbles giving way to panic-inducing digitized chimes.
Smile isn’t shy about leaning into jump scares, but Finn orchestrates these moments in ways that will not only make hardened horror hounds doubt what their eyes are seeing, but also leave them questioning their own hard-earned resilience to the most basic tools of scare-making. All the while, Bacon provides a much-needed emotional ballast against the onslaught of twists and bizarro frights, and it’s through her character that Finn’s chosen themes of inherited trauma and the demonization of mental health struggles come into clearest focus.
The horror genre is thoroughly rotten with films that use allegorical tools to explore how people attempt to exorcise their personal demons, but Smile brings audiences that catharsis in the most unexpected of ways. This is, after all, a mainstream studio effort about a being whose crocodile smile reflects back at us the gaping emotional wounds we hide behind our own painted-on grins.
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