Smile (2022)

We never go out of smile

Movies have been spooking audiences with the wrong kind of grin since early days of Hollywood: e.g. Lon Chaney’s beaver-hatted phantom in the lost London After Midnight (1924), Conrad Veidt’s rictus-locked Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928). There’s something about a smile detached from any warm reason to be smiling that gets under the skin in a way vampire fangs and werewolf claws can’t. Parker Finn clearly knows this history, and with his debut feature Smile he adds a new entry to that lineage.

The film follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), an ER psychiatrist already running on fumes, who watches a patient (Caitlin Stasey) die by suicide mid-session, wearing a serene, horrible smile in the moment she slits her own throat. Soon after, Rose starts seeing things that aren’t there and begins suspecting a supernatural root of the hallucinations plaguing her. She spends the rest of the runtime trying to outrun a curse that everyone around her insists is just stress or possibly mental illness she inherited from her unstable mother.

Smile is, to a degree that’s almost impressive, a film built entirely out of concepts from other films. The chain-of-victims structure is lifted wholesale from It Follows and The Ring, with obvious and equal debt to both. The film seems built from the ground up to recreate the jolts of the legendary “I saw her face” beat in Gore Verbinski’s Ring and the red-faced demon appearance in Insidious, executing a version of one of those two jump scares every ten minutes or so. Visually, Finn’s camera borrows It Follows‘s cool geometric prowl and rotation. Meanwhile, the slow drift from psychological menace into outright demonic possession has the exact arc and pacing of Hereditary. None of this obvious mimicry is disqualifying — most horror is a remix — but it’s a backhanded compliment when I say that Finn is quite adept at doing a bunch of impressions at once.

Smile suffers by being the most blatant, turn-key example of horror-about-trauma that I have ever seen. You can’t even call it a metaphor: Late in the film, a character flatly announces to Rose that the curse is “trauma.” It should go without saying, but the 115-minute runtime doesn’t help matters (I’m not surprised to learn this is an expansion of a short film, as it has about as much story and thematic content as you’d find in a short). You feel the padding especially in the saggy midsection.

For all that, Smile works because Finn is a genuinely gifted horror craftsman even when he isn’t an original one. Smile’s dread is sustained across its entire, logy runtime. And the jump scares are really quite good; Parker is better at generating jolts of terror than any of his inspirations except Verbinski. Many of the film’s best effects are practical, giving the images (e.g. a neck bending the wrong way) a tactile heft that CGI would have sanded down. Charlie Sarroff’s cinematography supports Finn’s vision wonderfully, using slow and steady camera pans and tilts that rotate the frame in all three dimensions, clinical bird’s-eye compositions (several felt even Wes Anderson in their levels of dollhouse symmetry), and head-on close-ups straight out of Silence of the Lambs. Most of this is staged in faded, anesthetized suburban interiors rather than haunted-mansion gloom, which offers a unique flavor.

As good as any visual is the sound, including Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s truly remarkable score: a shrieking, dissonant blend of strings and electronic bleeps that owes obvious debts to both Goblin’s work for Argento and Bernard Herrmann’s work for Hitchcock. It complements a jarring sound design full of thuds and unknown noises, always lurking.

The performances sit, to my eyes, at exactly replacement level, which is fine. Bacon (daughter of Kevin), who is in nearly every frame in what’s closer to a one-woman show than an ensemble film, is an entirely credible warm presence curdling into psychosis. She shrieks well and breaks down convincingly, even if she never reaches the operatic register hit by Toni Collette in Hereditary. The supporting cast is also just-fine all around, none of them noticeably improving or damaging the film, including Kyle Gallner as her ex-beau, Jessie T. Usher as her current one, Kal Penn as her boss, and Gillian Zinser as her skeptical sister. The one exception is the small performance by Stasey (also star of the short the film is based on) as an early victim and the vessel of the film’s freakiest curse smile.

Beyond the bloated runtime and obvious themes, the movie has plenty of storytelling problems. Parker relies way too much on gotchas from dream sequences and hallucinations, undoing what we’ve seen in a way that feels cheap. The finale is also underwhelming; I was ready for a full in hyper-zoom on one last, climactic death-smile, but we only see it from afar. Finn instead lingers on the face of someone else in a way that did not work for me. (It’s kinda lame that the first major death-smile we see is also the scariest.)

Still, Smile holds its menacing mood for nearly two hours, anchored by strong craft and one great, provocative image: a sinister curved lip upward like a crack in the soul. Chaney and Veidt would’ve approved.

Is It Good?

Good (5/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.