The whole world smiles with you
There are films for which the "here's what this reminded me of" game can lead to some very strained and convoluted comparisons that make no sense to anyone, not even the person making them. This is not the case with Smile, which could not be more straightforwardly the film that happens when It Follows and The Ring have a baby. And I even think it can stand up to that comparison - it's not as good as either of those, but it's not much weaker, and I would be tempted to say that I think it's more hairs-stand-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck scary than those classics of modern horror, with the necessary caveat that one man's scary is another man's garbage cheesy clichés. At the very least, it gets a suitable amount of mileage from the uncanny creepy-crawliness promised by the title: people smiling when those people oughtn't be smiling is just freaky, on par with (though not as intense as) the sound of children laughing where you are damn sure that children aren't.
It gets right to the point: Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), who has a traumatic past that we glimpse in a quick, fragmentary flashback right at the start, is now an emergency room psychiatrist at a New Jersey hospital. She works too hard, and her last meeting on this particular day is with Laura (Caitlin Stasey), a 26-year-old grad student who had a fucking horrible week after being the sole witness to the violent suicide of a professor seven days ago. Now, as she stares around with the dark eyes and pallid complexion of somebody who hasn't gotten a proper night of sleep in, oh, about seven days, she prattles at top speed to Rose about the thing following her that can take the form of any person she knows or any stranger, and you can only tell when it's present because of its hideous, cold smile. It has been taunting her ever since the suicide, and told her today that she was going to die in the extremely immediate future, and in fact she does so right then and there, in the middle of talking to Rose, picking up a broken shard of a ceramic coffee cup and slashing her own throat, starting at the ear. Cue the film's title card, with the word SMILE flashing in multiple colors all madly, while the music screeches incoherently.
The music screeching incoherently, for what it's worth, will turn out to be the film's single best asset, all apologies to first time feature writer-director Parker Finn, who makes up for his film's total lack of originality with an extraordinary sense of how to wring the most possible tension out of jump scares in underlit rooms. And apologies as well to Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Hollywood royalty - her parents are Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick - whose extremely effective performance of a boilerplate horror movie type (she's rational, then she gets a little confused and rattled, then she's a gibbering, teary-eyed maniac) does not in any way suggest someone who came up through nepotism.* Both of those people are doing good work for Smile, giving it strong bones and enough of a foundation in solid aesthetics and character work that it feels like a real movie and not just microwaved leftovers, as can so very often happen with trashy jump scare-based boilerplate horror. And make no mistake, Smile is all of that, in a good way. But the star of the show here is easily Cristobal Tapia de Veer, a Chilean-Canadian composer who has mostly worked in television; this is his third feature, and the first of those with any sort of broadly visible release. Which gives me hope that we'll be hearing more from him, though I can't suppose that what he's doing with Smile would work again as well, or work in any different context.
The musical score for the film routinely resembles "music" only in the broadest sense; it is full of toneless, tuneless squawks of instruments slamming out notes, human voices vocalising shrilly, bass lumbering along in search of a melody. It's alien and menacing, creating an off-kilter sonic backdrop for Rose's steady and swift descent into panicky madness, one that pretty much goes right into the amygdala without stopping along the way. It is, to be very clear, not the kind of score that I think could imaginably be fun to listen to in any other other context than underpinning these images and filling them with screaming terror; but need a score be pleasant to listen to in its own right, when it's doing that kind of very important work in the context of a complete film? Smile provides a persuasive argument that it doesn't merely not need to, perhaps it even shouldn't.
Anyway, the score is a roaring atonal nightmare, and it does a lot to pour wearying tension into a film that has quite a lot of that to go around. At times, in fact, I think Finn could be accused of "over"-directing things, particularly when the time comes to pull out the Dutch angles, or even turn the camera all the way around on its head, something that happens multiple times to cue a scene transition (mostly it's upside-down when it's pointing at landscapes, but at one point it's inside a room, and indeed it's turning in a spiral motion during that same shot, so it's a whole lot of whatever it is). This is sometimes useful to suggest the increasingly fragile grasp on reality that Rose is suffering from; it is also sometimes just plain too much, elaborate and highly visible style that does nothing but insist that we notice, really well, how dang crazy the movie is.
Still, too much style is better than not enough style, and Smile at the very least has no end of heavy atmosphere: Charlie Sarroff's cinematography indulges in dark interiors where spaces feel like they've been willed into existence out of smudges, making the lines between what's real, what isn't, and what's simply an artifact of crap on the lens hard to parse. One of the best moments in the film involves a face and human shape appear in a dark space, such that not only can Rose not be sure that she's seeing something, we're not even sure that we're seeing something, since the whole frame is so uncomfortably indistinct.
It's a very well-tuned haunted house stunt, rocketing us around in a rattly cart while thing shout "boo!", and I appreciate something so willing to just be creepy and gory (Rose's visions start to get increasingly repulsive and violent, and this doesn't really let up until literally the last minutes of the film) and visceral, when those are increasingly hard to find in movies that are also well-made. It's a plain, to-the-point horror movie, even as it feints in the direction of something more dour. Smile takes as its main topic the most beloved theme of "elevated horror", the persistence of trauma; Rose, we learn, was 10 years old when found her mother's body, dead of suicide, and the horror of this has captured every moment of her life. Later, we learn that the Smiling Thing, whatever it is and whatever it wants, literally spreads through trauma: it needs its victims to commit suicide horribly in front of other people, so those other people are traumatised by the experience, and that's what gives it the chance to jump into their brains. And this is all carried off by a film that never once pretends, A24-style, that it's "better" than genre; it wants to be scary, or at least creepy, or at least have enough aggressively-placed jump scares to make you feel like you've taken a few punches to the gut by the time it's all done. And it achieves this while also being produced with enough solid craft on both sides of the camera to feel like a real movie, not just factory-made horror content.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
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*In fact, the sense I have gotten is that her parents weren't really happy that she wanted to follow their career path, but elected to stay out of her way in doing so.
It gets right to the point: Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), who has a traumatic past that we glimpse in a quick, fragmentary flashback right at the start, is now an emergency room psychiatrist at a New Jersey hospital. She works too hard, and her last meeting on this particular day is with Laura (Caitlin Stasey), a 26-year-old grad student who had a fucking horrible week after being the sole witness to the violent suicide of a professor seven days ago. Now, as she stares around with the dark eyes and pallid complexion of somebody who hasn't gotten a proper night of sleep in, oh, about seven days, she prattles at top speed to Rose about the thing following her that can take the form of any person she knows or any stranger, and you can only tell when it's present because of its hideous, cold smile. It has been taunting her ever since the suicide, and told her today that she was going to die in the extremely immediate future, and in fact she does so right then and there, in the middle of talking to Rose, picking up a broken shard of a ceramic coffee cup and slashing her own throat, starting at the ear. Cue the film's title card, with the word SMILE flashing in multiple colors all madly, while the music screeches incoherently.
The music screeching incoherently, for what it's worth, will turn out to be the film's single best asset, all apologies to first time feature writer-director Parker Finn, who makes up for his film's total lack of originality with an extraordinary sense of how to wring the most possible tension out of jump scares in underlit rooms. And apologies as well to Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Hollywood royalty - her parents are Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick - whose extremely effective performance of a boilerplate horror movie type (she's rational, then she gets a little confused and rattled, then she's a gibbering, teary-eyed maniac) does not in any way suggest someone who came up through nepotism.* Both of those people are doing good work for Smile, giving it strong bones and enough of a foundation in solid aesthetics and character work that it feels like a real movie and not just microwaved leftovers, as can so very often happen with trashy jump scare-based boilerplate horror. And make no mistake, Smile is all of that, in a good way. But the star of the show here is easily Cristobal Tapia de Veer, a Chilean-Canadian composer who has mostly worked in television; this is his third feature, and the first of those with any sort of broadly visible release. Which gives me hope that we'll be hearing more from him, though I can't suppose that what he's doing with Smile would work again as well, or work in any different context.
The musical score for the film routinely resembles "music" only in the broadest sense; it is full of toneless, tuneless squawks of instruments slamming out notes, human voices vocalising shrilly, bass lumbering along in search of a melody. It's alien and menacing, creating an off-kilter sonic backdrop for Rose's steady and swift descent into panicky madness, one that pretty much goes right into the amygdala without stopping along the way. It is, to be very clear, not the kind of score that I think could imaginably be fun to listen to in any other other context than underpinning these images and filling them with screaming terror; but need a score be pleasant to listen to in its own right, when it's doing that kind of very important work in the context of a complete film? Smile provides a persuasive argument that it doesn't merely not need to, perhaps it even shouldn't.
Anyway, the score is a roaring atonal nightmare, and it does a lot to pour wearying tension into a film that has quite a lot of that to go around. At times, in fact, I think Finn could be accused of "over"-directing things, particularly when the time comes to pull out the Dutch angles, or even turn the camera all the way around on its head, something that happens multiple times to cue a scene transition (mostly it's upside-down when it's pointing at landscapes, but at one point it's inside a room, and indeed it's turning in a spiral motion during that same shot, so it's a whole lot of whatever it is). This is sometimes useful to suggest the increasingly fragile grasp on reality that Rose is suffering from; it is also sometimes just plain too much, elaborate and highly visible style that does nothing but insist that we notice, really well, how dang crazy the movie is.
Still, too much style is better than not enough style, and Smile at the very least has no end of heavy atmosphere: Charlie Sarroff's cinematography indulges in dark interiors where spaces feel like they've been willed into existence out of smudges, making the lines between what's real, what isn't, and what's simply an artifact of crap on the lens hard to parse. One of the best moments in the film involves a face and human shape appear in a dark space, such that not only can Rose not be sure that she's seeing something, we're not even sure that we're seeing something, since the whole frame is so uncomfortably indistinct.
It's a very well-tuned haunted house stunt, rocketing us around in a rattly cart while thing shout "boo!", and I appreciate something so willing to just be creepy and gory (Rose's visions start to get increasingly repulsive and violent, and this doesn't really let up until literally the last minutes of the film) and visceral, when those are increasingly hard to find in movies that are also well-made. It's a plain, to-the-point horror movie, even as it feints in the direction of something more dour. Smile takes as its main topic the most beloved theme of "elevated horror", the persistence of trauma; Rose, we learn, was 10 years old when found her mother's body, dead of suicide, and the horror of this has captured every moment of her life. Later, we learn that the Smiling Thing, whatever it is and whatever it wants, literally spreads through trauma: it needs its victims to commit suicide horribly in front of other people, so those other people are traumatised by the experience, and that's what gives it the chance to jump into their brains. And this is all carried off by a film that never once pretends, A24-style, that it's "better" than genre; it wants to be scary, or at least creepy, or at least have enough aggressively-placed jump scares to make you feel like you've taken a few punches to the gut by the time it's all done. And it achieves this while also being produced with enough solid craft on both sides of the camera to feel like a real movie, not just factory-made horror content.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*In fact, the sense I have gotten is that her parents weren't really happy that she wanted to follow their career path, but elected to stay out of her way in doing so.
