Film Review: Smile (2022)

Welcome to Smiling Demon Double Feature! I already reviewed Truth or Dare (2018) Director’s Cut and now I’ll be reviewing Smile (2022). Warning: SPOILERS.

Dr Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist dealing with her own trauma, finds herself haunted by a smiling entity after a terrified patient kills  herself in front of her. As she tries to find out what’s happening to her, she learns that she’s not the first person to go through this and that it always ends the same way - death.

The premise isn’t exactly original - It Follows (2014) has a similar concept and Truth or Dare (2018) has a similar demonic look - but the beginning was promising with Laura’s story, her gory suicide, and first glimpse of the titular smile. However, the rest of the movie never fulfils this promise. It was a wise move to add smile-free hallucinations to the entity’s very limited bag of tricks, because apart from Laura and later a nonexistent woman at Rose’s nephew’s birthday party, the demonic smiles that signal the entity’s presence were unimpressive and not as numerous as you’d expect. The sequence in which Rose’s therapist, Madeline, turns out to be the entity, was particularly disappointing, with a lame attempt at a preternatural smile and a surprising amount of drool. The scene in which the entity masquerades as Rose’s sister Holly didn’t even make sense after learning that it's in her mind. Rose isn’t even looking at Holly’s house, but the audience gets to see ‘her’ come out and walk to the car to freak Rose out. How can the hallucinations be seen when she’s not looking? Per the movie itself, they shouldn’t exist independently of her. The chuckling was just sad - no one managed to produce a truly scary laugh. In addition to all this, Rose is shown losing time and the widow of a previous victim tells her that her husband did things he didn’t remember doing. This all fits with the entity taking ever more control of Rose’s mind, but it wasn’t used enough. Rose doesn’t even get to realize that this means she was the one who killed her cat and replaced her nephew’s gift with him. And that’s the deadlier she’s allowed to be, as a sequence of her killing a former patient to get rid of the curse turns out to be all in her head. Because, yes, much like with the previously mentioned It Follows and Truth or Dare, the only way to get the curse off of you is to pass it to someone else. Though in Smile the effects seem to be permanent and not just a delay of the next meeting with the entity. Another problem I had with this movie was that some of the more emotionally charged scenes just didn’t work for me. I’ve already mentioned the Demon Madeline sequence, but there was also Rose’s meltdown at her nephew’s birthday party. It should’ve been a scary sequence full of despair as Rose realizes what’s happening and everyone just looks at her like she’s crazy. However, while I knew what I was supposed to be getting from this scene, Rose falling on the glass table ended up being unintentionally funny instead. It’s awful because she was even holding her dead cat, but it, along with the discovery of said dead cat, looked more ridiculous than painful, like it could’ve been part of a parody rather than a serious horror movie.

For a movie so concerned with psychology and relationships, Smile gives viewers the most disjointed, chemistry-free cast I’ve ever seen. They come across as strangers who just met to play their parts in a movie, and the way said parts were written doesn’t help. Rose’s sister, Holly, is introduced as the typically vapid bottle blonde with the traditional marriage to an equally vapid husband who believes the only reason to become a doctor is to make money. They serve as a ridiculously obvious contrast to altruistic, serious, brown-haired Rose, who, is revealed later, has a very good reason to hate the big sister who left her with their mentally unstable mother. Holly says that she left because she was getting the worst of their mother’s abuse, but that doesn’t justify abandoning her little sister. Presumably, they reconnected after their mother died when Rose was only 10, but why or how they maintained any sort of relationship well into adulthood is a mystery. Then, there’s Trevor, Rose’s live-in fiance. They have zero chemistry and I don’t even understand how they ended up engaged; especially after she explains to her ex, Joel, how she couldn’t allow herself to be vulnerable with him due to her childhood trauma and it’s clear that she hasn’t overcome it yet. I can’t blame Trevor for not believing her talk about being haunted, but he felt more like a friend than a romantic partner during their interactions. Their hug when he comes home in the beginning looked intimate, but after that there was nothing. Did the movie just need someone for Rose to interact with? Her chemistry with Joel is equally nonexistent, though they spend the most time together, and he’s supposed to care about her. The only relationship of Rose’s that works is with Madeline, as you’d expect them to not be overly friendly. I guess Dr Desai works, too, as he’s Rose’s boss, but it’s hard to believe he cares beyond that even though he goes to see her after she ends up in the ER.

But who or what is this evil smiler who preys on trauma victims by re-traumatizing them with OTT suicides and hounding them until it’s ready to take over and end their lives in front of the next victim? No one knows, and though it chats with Rose a couple of times, it never tells. All the audience knows is that the only way to avoid death is to kill someone in front of another person so that the curse will pass to them and the suicidal chain carries on from there. It needs trauma to spread, it can look like anyone, and the most a victim was able to survive was a week. During the final confrontation, Rose finally says everything she’s been keeping inside: she ignored her mother’s plea for help because she was scared of her, inadvertently causing her death. Except, coming to terms with the past doesn’t stop the entity, who turns into a gigantic, deformed version of Rose’s mother and messes with her until it’s time to reveal its true face, or lack of it, and climb inside her. My first thought when I saw this was how the image of the very tall creature advancing reminded me of the scene in It Follows when the very tall man breaks into Jay’s room. And of course, it links back to Laura choking before being possessed and killing herself. But how is the entity physically getting inside its victims? Wasn’t in their minds? That’s a recurring theme throughout the movie, with Rose repeating to her patients that what’s happening in their minds can’t hurt them, only to come to realize that in her particular case, yes, it very much can. The entity’s skinless look isn’t that scary. I read more than one post that said the several mouths were the mouths of its victims and it was consuming them, but that’s not clear at all; considering the entity smiles, the several mouths could’ve been a reference to that, and if they were from its victims, shouldn’t there be a lot more of them? Really, the movie should’ve spent more time on its monster because it’s woefully underdeveloped. The 2 victims before Rose and Rose herself all had past traumas, so it looked like the entity had picked them on purpose, but if it can be passed to someone else by simply killing a person in front of them, the whole thing becomes random. While I didn’t like how It Follows never bothered to explain its supernatural stalker, the fact that the characters were younger and had less resources made it easier to accept that than here. Rose finds out about the other suicides, has access to a previous victim’s papers, and meets with a survivor of the curse who had already done his own research. That she gets nothing about the entity itself out of this is just crazy. Also, given how quickly the victims die and how spectacularly, I find it hard to believe that absolutely no one had noticed the suicide chain before. When Rose faces the entity at her old family home, it was the perfect time for it to say a little more about itself, but the audience gets nothing. Why did the movie let the entity talk? It could’ve easily kept it silent like It Follows. Or maybe that was the problem? That it would be too much like It Follows? Well, if that was the case, it’s funny that the movie apparently didn’t have a problem with how similar the evil smile + possession before death are to Truth or Dare, which managed to have much creepier smiles. (Sorry, Smile entity, Calux got the best demonic, CGI-enhanced grin) And why even add the smiling bit? It made sense for trickster Calux, but here it’s just one more item for the mishmash that is the Smile monster.

Everything about this movie screams Elevated Horror - limited sets, a small cast, muted colours, and the horror as an unsubtle commentary on a deep subject. This isn’t just about gory deaths and some supernatural monster - it’s about the nature of trauma. Rose finally dealing with the unresolved issues that have shaped her life since childhood is as, or maybe even more important than stopping this murderous entity. So, I was pretty surprised at how CGI-heavy the final confrontation was. Showing the monster is rarely a good choice, and that gigantic, deformed version of Rose’s mother I mentioned earlier looked pretty bad. This means that the scene where the entity removes that clearly fake, CGI face to expose the many-mouthed, skinless also clearly CGI face underneath is far from the terrifying moment it should’ve been. Then the audience gets a wide shot of the skinless gigantic entity opening Rose’s mouth to get inside, even though it was supposed to be already inside her, that really shouldn’t have looked as funny as it did to me (clearly, I’m a weirdo). The very ending, with possessed Rose setting herself on fire in front of Joel looked way better than all the demon stuff. The beginning of the end credits features a bizarre moment that made me wonder if maybe the movie did have some comedic aspirations: the first song we hear isn’t some sinister instrumental music but the bubbly Lollipop by The Chordettes. Turns out that it was just a little joke because for some reason, the entity was called ‘Lollipop’ during the shoot, and the people behind this decided it was a good idea to have it play right after the lead character burns herself to death. WTF?

VERDICT

Smile has a good premise and a good beginning, but it’s never as scary as it should’ve been. Most of the better scares were actually jump scares. The upside down camera and oddly placed weird sound effects were likely meant to give the movie an unsettling, ominous atmosphere, but instead they looked random and distracting, especially the camera angles. None of the characters stand out apart from Rose, and they all feel weirdly disconnected. Since the movie let sweet, little Lollipop talk, there was no reason for it to not say more about itself. It didn’t have to be a full blown villain monologue, but something, anything more than the uninspired menacing we got would’ve been better.