I watched this horror movie based on its deeply creepy trailer. It is, indeed, sometimes very scary. Unfortunately, that's the only thing it does well. Smile is wrong about human behavior, it's wrong about police procedure, it's wrong about hospitals, and it's incredibly wrong about mental health care, which is unfortunate as its protagonist is a psychiatrist. Probably. One of the many things this movie doesn't know is the difference between a psychiatrist and a therapist.
Smile is basically three or four great scares and 50 pounds of WTF in a trenchcoat.
Dr. Rose Cotter is a doctor working in the psych ward of a large hospital. A young woman is brought in, apparently traumatized after witnessing a bizarre suicide. Rose interviews her in what seems to be their standard interview room. It's huge and empty, with two chairs in the middle like the cubicles in Severance, plus a convenient china vase in case some suicidal or homicidal person would like to break it and obtain a sharp object.
After saying that she sees creepy smiling people everywhere, the woman breaks the vase, smiles creepily, and cuts her own throat. There is a bright red emergency phone, but it's on a wall in a room the size of a warehouse, so Rose is unable to get from the chair to the wall in time to get help.
This is not the only ginormous empty room with two people huddled in the middle in this movie. Another one turns up later in a prison, of all random places. I have no idea why the director thought this was a thing.
Rose gets interviewed by a douchey-looking cop whom I will call Douchecop, who turns out to be her ex-boyfriend. She then has an encounter with another mental patient, who yells at her and freaks her out. She shouts, "I need a 5150!"
A 5150 is an involuntary detainment in a mental hospital. The guy she wants it for is already a live-in patient at a mental hospital. So she's basically saying, "Put him where he is some more!"
Kal Penn as Dr. Desai, her supervisor and the only person in the movie who 1) can act, 2) reacts like a human being, puts her on leave. Rose goes home to her fiance who can't act and to her cat. At this point![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scioscribe, who was watching this with me, confirmed that the cat dies and how its body is found - this will be relevant later. (I only realize now, while writing this, that having seen the entire movie, I have no idea who killed the cat.)
Rose then starts having spooky smile encounters. One of these is an absolutely brilliant scary scene involving a call to home security. Like I said, the scares are mostly good to excellent. It's everything else that's the problem.
Rose goes to her own psychiatrist, where a scene ensues which gets like sixteen things wrong about therapy, trauma reactions, medication, etc in ten minutes.
Her psychiatrist condescendingly chides Rose for diagnosing herself and requesting medication for what she thinks are post-traumatic hallucinations, saying, "I don't think this is about the woman who killed herself in front of you. You only knew her for about ten minutes. I think this is really about your mother's suicide."
WHEN SOMEONE SLASHES THEIR THROAT IN FRONT OF YOU, IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW LONG YOU KNEW THEM.
The psychiatrist then says she can't be hallucinating because she's clearly not psychotic (PTSD-based hallucinations are not the same as psychosis, and people who have any kind of hallucination can seem perfectly fine at other times) and refuses to give her meds. GIVE THIS POOR WOMAN SOME XANAX.
I forgot to mention that basically everyone but Kal Penn is randomly mean. Douchecop is randomly mean, not in a scary cop way but in a petty whiny way. Rose's sister and her husband are randomly dicks to her. I would call this a theme, but this movie doesn't have themes, so it's more of a pattern with no apparent reason.
Things get even more batshit from here on out. Cut for spoilers and the only dead cat scene I've ever enjoyed, because it's accidentally hilarious.
I knew going in that the cat dies and its body turns up in a gift-wrapped birthday present. So when Rose and her mean, can't-act fiance show up with gift-wrapped presents for their nephew's birthday party, I knew exactly where this was going and it made it even more hilarious.
The nephew sloooooowly unwraps the gift. He holds up the dead cat! Since the only evidence of violence is a tiny patch of blood that we don't even see immediately, there should have been a beat in which everyone briefly thinks it's a plushie that looks disturbingly realistic and/or dead. There isn't. He holds up what looks like a plushie cat, and everyone starts screaming hysterically! Zoom in on the cat's name tag, in case we didn't recognize it as the missing cat we saw multiple times earlier! Rose holds up the dead gift cat, screams, and falls over backward and crashes through a glass table!
Rose, convinced that she's cursed, goes interviews the widow of the man who her dead patient saw commit suicide. She learns that he too witnessed a suicide! The dialogue for that goes like this:
Widow:"At the convention, he witnessed a woman kill herself."
Rose: "So you're saying he saw someone commit suicide?"
Yes. That is exactly what she just said. This sort of dialogue happens a lot.
Rose tries to tell her fiance what's going on, and he instantly turns on her, says he was always suspicious of her because her mom killed herself, and screams, "Mental illness is hereditary! I looked it up!"
I instantly pictured him googling "mental illness hereditary." And it's not just him. Everyone in the entire movie is forever referring to "mental illness" like it's just one thing.
In desperation, Rose visits Douchecop. He's randomly mean and whiny to her, but reluctantly digs up some crime records for her. In yet another example of "human behavior, what is it?" he is freaked out by a fairly normal murder scene photo and recoils from her sitting beside him like she's a roach. But eventually he discovers that there's a string of 20 people who witnessed a suicide, then committed suicide in front of a witness, then that witness committed suicide in front of a witness...
Rose says it's a curse. Like everyone else in the movie, Douchecop absolutely refuses to entertain the possibility of something supernatural despite evidence piling up for it. He instead suggests that it's a "suicide blackmail cult." Yeah, that's much more plausible!
They find that one person in the chain has survived, but is now in jail. They go to interview him, but are told, "You can see him for exactly ten minutes because otherwise you'd need a court order." What?
The survivor is interviewed in a tiny cubicle in the middle of a vast empty warehouse, for no reason. He explains that you can murder someone instead of killing yourself, and the murder witness will then get the curse. He says that the smile entity feeds on trauma. That's the most explanation we'll ever get for anything.
Rose flees maniacally and encounters Dr. Desai. She tells him she needs to be alone, and he spots a knife beside her soda. He tells the cops, and they put an APB on her. You cannot get an APB on someone on the basis of "She was acting weird and I saw a knife in her car!"
The theme of pointless zoom-ins on random things continues when she goes to her dead mentally ill mother's house. There is no reason we needed a long, slow zoom into its street number.
While there, there's a loooooooooong sequence while she wanders around. Then another loooooong sequence while she confronts her trauma over her mother's suicide. Then a totally nonsensical climax while she battles the smile entity in the form of a hair metal demon. Then a looong sequence where she returns to Douchecop and gives him an impassioned speech about how much she loves him, which is 100% out of left field.
Then it turns out that the final boss battle and the Douchecop sudden epic love story was a hallucination! In reality, the smile demon possesses her (that sequence is actually very creepy) and passes on the curse to Douchecop.
The end.
Of all genres, horror is perhaps the best at constructing a story around a single powerful image or concept that represents its central theme: the Tethered in Us, the biological blending of the Shimmer in Annihilation, the sexually transmitted curse in It Follows. All of those concepts also represent the themee of the movies. The image Smile is built around, the smile, has nothing to do with trauma or anything else.
The credits have three completely random music/sound cues play over them: first "Lollipop," then a song I forget, then screeching and mumbling that I assume was Douchecop's soft metalcore band. (You just know he had one.)
Smile a movie made by someone with a real skill for being scary, which is not easy, and apparently no experience whatsoever with human beings or their institutions. Smile is about 1% brilliant, 9% very good, 90% terrible, and 100% batshit. I have never laughed so hard at a dead cat.
In conclusion, "Mental illness is hereditary! I looked it up!"
https://amzn.to/3FQiCO3
Smile is basically three or four great scares and 50 pounds of WTF in a trenchcoat.
Dr. Rose Cotter is a doctor working in the psych ward of a large hospital. A young woman is brought in, apparently traumatized after witnessing a bizarre suicide. Rose interviews her in what seems to be their standard interview room. It's huge and empty, with two chairs in the middle like the cubicles in Severance, plus a convenient china vase in case some suicidal or homicidal person would like to break it and obtain a sharp object.
After saying that she sees creepy smiling people everywhere, the woman breaks the vase, smiles creepily, and cuts her own throat. There is a bright red emergency phone, but it's on a wall in a room the size of a warehouse, so Rose is unable to get from the chair to the wall in time to get help.
This is not the only ginormous empty room with two people huddled in the middle in this movie. Another one turns up later in a prison, of all random places. I have no idea why the director thought this was a thing.
Rose gets interviewed by a douchey-looking cop whom I will call Douchecop, who turns out to be her ex-boyfriend. She then has an encounter with another mental patient, who yells at her and freaks her out. She shouts, "I need a 5150!"
A 5150 is an involuntary detainment in a mental hospital. The guy she wants it for is already a live-in patient at a mental hospital. So she's basically saying, "Put him where he is some more!"
Kal Penn as Dr. Desai, her supervisor and the only person in the movie who 1) can act, 2) reacts like a human being, puts her on leave. Rose goes home to her fiance who can't act and to her cat. At this point
scioscribe, who was watching this with me, confirmed that the cat dies and how its body is found - this will be relevant later. (I only realize now, while writing this, that having seen the entire movie, I have no idea who killed the cat.)Rose then starts having spooky smile encounters. One of these is an absolutely brilliant scary scene involving a call to home security. Like I said, the scares are mostly good to excellent. It's everything else that's the problem.
Rose goes to her own psychiatrist, where a scene ensues which gets like sixteen things wrong about therapy, trauma reactions, medication, etc in ten minutes.
Her psychiatrist condescendingly chides Rose for diagnosing herself and requesting medication for what she thinks are post-traumatic hallucinations, saying, "I don't think this is about the woman who killed herself in front of you. You only knew her for about ten minutes. I think this is really about your mother's suicide."
WHEN SOMEONE SLASHES THEIR THROAT IN FRONT OF YOU, IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW LONG YOU KNEW THEM.
The psychiatrist then says she can't be hallucinating because she's clearly not psychotic (PTSD-based hallucinations are not the same as psychosis, and people who have any kind of hallucination can seem perfectly fine at other times) and refuses to give her meds. GIVE THIS POOR WOMAN SOME XANAX.
I forgot to mention that basically everyone but Kal Penn is randomly mean. Douchecop is randomly mean, not in a scary cop way but in a petty whiny way. Rose's sister and her husband are randomly dicks to her. I would call this a theme, but this movie doesn't have themes, so it's more of a pattern with no apparent reason.
Things get even more batshit from here on out. Cut for spoilers and the only dead cat scene I've ever enjoyed, because it's accidentally hilarious.
I knew going in that the cat dies and its body turns up in a gift-wrapped birthday present. So when Rose and her mean, can't-act fiance show up with gift-wrapped presents for their nephew's birthday party, I knew exactly where this was going and it made it even more hilarious.
The nephew sloooooowly unwraps the gift. He holds up the dead cat! Since the only evidence of violence is a tiny patch of blood that we don't even see immediately, there should have been a beat in which everyone briefly thinks it's a plushie that looks disturbingly realistic and/or dead. There isn't. He holds up what looks like a plushie cat, and everyone starts screaming hysterically! Zoom in on the cat's name tag, in case we didn't recognize it as the missing cat we saw multiple times earlier! Rose holds up the dead gift cat, screams, and falls over backward and crashes through a glass table!
Rose, convinced that she's cursed, goes interviews the widow of the man who her dead patient saw commit suicide. She learns that he too witnessed a suicide! The dialogue for that goes like this:
Widow:"At the convention, he witnessed a woman kill herself."
Rose: "So you're saying he saw someone commit suicide?"
Yes. That is exactly what she just said. This sort of dialogue happens a lot.
Rose tries to tell her fiance what's going on, and he instantly turns on her, says he was always suspicious of her because her mom killed herself, and screams, "Mental illness is hereditary! I looked it up!"
I instantly pictured him googling "mental illness hereditary." And it's not just him. Everyone in the entire movie is forever referring to "mental illness" like it's just one thing.
In desperation, Rose visits Douchecop. He's randomly mean and whiny to her, but reluctantly digs up some crime records for her. In yet another example of "human behavior, what is it?" he is freaked out by a fairly normal murder scene photo and recoils from her sitting beside him like she's a roach. But eventually he discovers that there's a string of 20 people who witnessed a suicide, then committed suicide in front of a witness, then that witness committed suicide in front of a witness...
Rose says it's a curse. Like everyone else in the movie, Douchecop absolutely refuses to entertain the possibility of something supernatural despite evidence piling up for it. He instead suggests that it's a "suicide blackmail cult." Yeah, that's much more plausible!
They find that one person in the chain has survived, but is now in jail. They go to interview him, but are told, "You can see him for exactly ten minutes because otherwise you'd need a court order." What?
The survivor is interviewed in a tiny cubicle in the middle of a vast empty warehouse, for no reason. He explains that you can murder someone instead of killing yourself, and the murder witness will then get the curse. He says that the smile entity feeds on trauma. That's the most explanation we'll ever get for anything.
Rose flees maniacally and encounters Dr. Desai. She tells him she needs to be alone, and he spots a knife beside her soda. He tells the cops, and they put an APB on her. You cannot get an APB on someone on the basis of "She was acting weird and I saw a knife in her car!"
The theme of pointless zoom-ins on random things continues when she goes to her dead mentally ill mother's house. There is no reason we needed a long, slow zoom into its street number.
While there, there's a loooooooooong sequence while she wanders around. Then another loooooong sequence while she confronts her trauma over her mother's suicide. Then a totally nonsensical climax while she battles the smile entity in the form of a hair metal demon. Then a looong sequence where she returns to Douchecop and gives him an impassioned speech about how much she loves him, which is 100% out of left field.
Then it turns out that the final boss battle and the Douchecop sudden epic love story was a hallucination! In reality, the smile demon possesses her (that sequence is actually very creepy) and passes on the curse to Douchecop.
The end.
Of all genres, horror is perhaps the best at constructing a story around a single powerful image or concept that represents its central theme: the Tethered in Us, the biological blending of the Shimmer in Annihilation, the sexually transmitted curse in It Follows. All of those concepts also represent the themee of the movies. The image Smile is built around, the smile, has nothing to do with trauma or anything else.
The credits have three completely random music/sound cues play over them: first "Lollipop," then a song I forget, then screeching and mumbling that I assume was Douchecop's soft metalcore band. (You just know he had one.)
Smile a movie made by someone with a real skill for being scary, which is not easy, and apparently no experience whatsoever with human beings or their institutions. Smile is about 1% brilliant, 9% very good, 90% terrible, and 100% batshit. I have never laughed so hard at a dead cat.
In conclusion, "Mental illness is hereditary! I looked it up!"
https://amzn.to/3FQiCO3
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