Sometimes a great image is all you need. Take Venom, one of Marvel’s most enduring characters and the star of a series of multi-million-dollar blockbusters, who exists solely because comic artist Todd McFarlane liked drawing Spider-Man with an enormous Big Daddy Roth tongue. Christopher Nolan, for all of his pop-cerebral sheen, isn’t above building an entire film around the concept of “Doesn’t it look neat when you play this scene backwards?” Even music isn’t immune to a good visual hook: consider the Kabuki monsters of KISS or the nattily-dressed eyeballs of the Residents. There is, of course, more to great art than a good notebook scribble– but there doesn’t always have to be.
Smile, the new horror movie by Parker Finn (not to be confused with MIchael Ritchie’s 1975 black comedy of the same name), is essentially a one-trick pony, but it’s a good trick. Psychiatrist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) interviews a prospective patient who swears she’s being followed by a malevolent… something… which can assume the face of anyone she’s ever met, but which invariably gives those faces a sinister, unblinking smile. After the patient messily dispenses with herself right in Rose’s office (but not before flashing that eerie grin herself), Rose finds herself similarly troubled; catatonic patients flash maniacal grins at her when no one else is looking, and discrepancies around her house– first minor, and then very fucking major– begin to make her loved ones and colleagues wonder if she’s following in the footsteps of her troubled mother. With the help of her police detective ex (perennial genre film scene-stealer Kyle Gallner), Rose tries to figure out what’s chasing her– and how to get it out of her head.
Seasoned horror fans won’t find very much new here: the chain-letter ghosts of It Follows and The Ring, the inherited-mental-illness-as-demonic-entity of Hereditary, a healthy dollop of the ooey-gooey horror manga of Junji Ito (to say nothing of the music videos of Aphex Twin, whose Richard D. James could probably sue if facial expressions were covered under copyright law). But any fan with the smallest amount of affection for Jason Voorhees can excuse some amount of plagiarism if done well, and I’m happy to report that Smile is most certainly that; it’s derivative pulp, but it’s pretty darn good derivative pulp. The scares are shameless but clean and effective, and even when a punchline is telegraphed, there is pleasure in watching as the trap is sprung, and in squirming as we wait for it to snap shut. There are some wonderfully grotesque practical effects, particularly in the third act, when the horrors inevitably lose their metaphorical shroud. All of this, combined with the delightfully cheesy, ironically twinkly score, makes Smile the cinematic equivalent of walking through a Spirit Halloween and laughing at yourself for jumping at all the motion-activated animatrons– which, to be clear, is one of my greatest joys of the season.
Is there anything going on under the surface? Surprisingly, yes, to a certain degree. “It’s about trauma” has become something of a cliché as a cheap shorthand for “elevating” genre fare, from slasher sequels to superhero movies. Smile is perhaps the first movie to actually have its characters say it outright, as trauma is explicitly cited as the sustenance that keeps the presence hopping from host to host. But, again, it mostly works, thanks to the talent both in front of and behind the camera. Bacon is an ideal lead for a story like this; the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Keira Knightley, her visage combines her parents’ features into something pensive and scrunched, like a more tightly wound Clea Duvall. We can see her constant analysis playing across her face, and we can tell exactly when she starts to realize how little control she has over the situation. Finn, for his part, uses the old Silence of the Lamb trick of framing dialogue in head-on closeups. But where Jonathan Demme used this technique to make us feel Clarice’s isolation in a hostile, male world, Finn invites us to join Rose in analyzing the faces around her– Gallner’s flirtatious smirk, the plastic Stepford-grin of Rose’s soccer-mom sister (Gillian Zinser), the practiced, reassuring smile of her own therapist (Robin Weigert). It’s easy to take for granted how many smiles we see in a day; when they become a sign of danger, it becomes hard to keep hold of one’s sanity.
Which, again, is the film’s raison d’etre: that smile, attached to a menacing Kubrick stare, is fucking creepy. If anything, one of the film’s greatest shortcomings is that Finn doesn’t utilize the smile enough; it figures into most of the film’s big setpieces, but it is ultimately only one of the tricks in the evil entity’s playbook, which also includes hallucination, apparent bouts of possession, and a truly inspired sight gag involving a twisted neck. It is standard monster movie practice, of course, to save the villain for the big moments, but the smile in Smile is literally the cheapest effect one could possibly use, and I can see no reason to have it constantly hovering in the background, at least to the same extent as the followers in It Follows. In a film like Smile, the audience should ideally walk out of the film as terrified of smiles as its protagonist, and I’m not sure if I quite got there.
But horror, like comedy or pornography, can be judged on the pure, primal level of the gut reactions it elicits. I saw Smile at one of those public-private preview screenings, in which members of the press see the movie alongside a theater full of average passholder Joes and Janes. At first I was annoyed by the dull roar that inevitably accompanies these crowds; I could spot several glowing cell phones from my seat, and a gentleman seated in front of me was actively snoring in between jump scares. But once the film chugged into motion, I realized that this is exactly the sort of crowd you want to see Smile with, all groaning and whooping in unison at all the right places. At one point, a woman involuntarily yelled, “Oh, shit!” and the entire theater broke into a wave of cathartic laughter. This is what I’d been missing the past couple of Halloween seasons, between the empty theaters of 2020 and the lackluster horror crop of 2021. Is it anyone’s idea of “elevated horror?” Probably not, but in the annals of cool-visual-based cinema, you could do a lot worse than “evil killer smile.”
Smile
2022
dir. Parker Finn
115 min.
Opens everywhere Friday, 9/30
