It's easy to call Smile derivative. It plainly quotes a lot of previous horror films. It focuses on a transferable curse where a monster gets you like The Ring, even directly paralleling that film's reveal of a victim's face. It focuses on a woman subtextually destroyed by her trauma, becoming more unstable as she comes closer to the supernatural truth of the surface text, a la Hereditary. Other Ari Aster-like upside-down cinematography appears. The monster is a curse reaper who wears many human faces and can appear anywhere, like It Follows. Perceptual fakeouts controlled by the monster where sequences are shown to have been illusions appear, like 1408 and Oculus. Even some of its startles feel similar to Sinister.
That's not to say the film is dull or pointless, however. It's still compelling, very scary, and tells a strong story. Rose is a psychologist who finds herself haunted after a patient who's seeing a monstrous force has a seizure and then gets up, smiling, and kills herself without ever changing her expression. Rose has lost her mother to suicide as a child, and the recent incident starts giving her the patient's own visions of random people smiling and frightening her. As she appears to be falling apart mentally due to her fear and the entity causing her to have seriously upsetting lapses in reality that frame her as more dangerous, she investigates the history of her patient and discovers a long chain of suicides, witnesses to traumatic deaths themselves shortly before they died, but also indicated to all have a past trauma beforehand as well.
Smile is a metaphor for dangerous mental health coping. The entity forces its victims to smile as they die, and the problems occur for Rose because she has failed to seriously address her trauma and put on a happy face to keep operating as she is. The story discusses the infectious nature of trauma and how a victim of trauma can easily become a victim of a traumatic event themselves and create new victims if they go untreated. It's a dark story with more of a cautionary than a triumphant spin.
The film excels in its horror and imagery. The smiling visions of the entity's victims are horrifically uncanny, and a few startles are awful. Even subtler scenes occur where something is done without big jumps but it makes you feel chilled and sick because of the horrible nature of the events. This film will get under your skin just as much as it shocks. It has everything—psychological unease, jumps, gore, and creature effects.
This film has to do a lot to escape being buried under its many clear influences, but I think it does so with a strong storytelling bent and excellent scares.
Film Likely to haunt horror neophytes more than mega-fans, but slick and scary all the same.
It's easy to call Smile derivative. It plainly quotes a lot of previous horror films. It focuses on a transferable curse where a monster gets you like The Ring, even directly paralleling that film's reveal of a victim's face. It focuses on a woman subtextually destroyed by her trauma, becoming more unstable as she comes closer to the supernatural truth of the surface text, a la Hereditary. Other Ari Aster-like upside-down cinematography appears. The monster is a curse reaper who wears many human faces and can appear anywhere, like It Follows. Perceptual fakeouts controlled by the monster where sequences are shown to have been illusions appear, like 1408 and Oculus. Even some of its startles feel similar to Sinister.
That's not to say the film is dull or pointless, however. It's still compelling, very scary, and tells a strong story. Rose is a psychologist who finds herself haunted after a patient who's seeing a monstrous force has a seizure and then gets up, smiling, and kills herself without ever changing her expression. Rose has lost her mother to suicide as a child, and the recent incident starts giving her the patient's own visions of random people smiling and frightening her. As she appears to be falling apart mentally due to her fear and the entity causing her to have seriously upsetting lapses in reality that frame her as more dangerous, she investigates the history of her patient and discovers a long chain of suicides, witnesses to traumatic deaths themselves shortly before they died, but also indicated to all have a past trauma beforehand as well.
Smile is a metaphor for dangerous mental health coping. The entity forces its victims to smile as they die, and the problems occur for Rose because she has failed to seriously address her trauma and put on a happy face to keep operating as she is. The story discusses the infectious nature of trauma and how a victim of trauma can easily become a victim of a traumatic event themselves and create new victims if they go untreated. It's a dark story with more of a cautionary than a triumphant spin.
The film excels in its horror and imagery. The smiling visions of the entity's victims are horrifically uncanny, and a few startles are awful. Even subtler scenes occur where something is done without big jumps but it makes you feel chilled and sick because of the horrible nature of the events. This film will get under your skin just as much as it shocks. It has everything—psychological unease, jumps, gore, and creature effects.
This film has to do a lot to escape being buried under its many clear influences, but I think it does so with a strong storytelling bent and excellent scares.