Smile: When An Upside-Down Frown is the Devil's Playground
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B-minus
There is no extent to which a horror film will not go to spread fear. That a smile could be the latest conduit to our worst nightmares is hardly surprising.
Smile, the debut feature from director Parker Finn, twists the expectations of a common pleasantry into something grotesque. It's creepy but not new.
Caitlin Stasey shows off her sinister grin in Smile.
Cinema's heavies have been taunting us with their smirks for years: In Kiss of Death (1947), Richard Widmark chills as a giggling psychopath, the demon in The Exorcist (1973) sneers with great delight at the multitude of atrocities it inflicts on its host. And then there is the most celebrated of all grinning villains, The Joker. (And as a kid, Kaa the Snake from The Jungle Book (1967) traumatized me with its hypnotic leer.)
But even if Smile is not entirely original, it's effective—sometimes.
Finn takes full advantage of the brain's inability to process the kind of vast dichotomy between appearance and intent. It's just plain creepy when the pleasant assumptions we attribute to something like a smile breaks down in the face of horrific acts of self-harm. It’s creepier still when the smiles on the faces of those afflicted are stretched well beyond congeniality; a sinister grin that has as much to do with the eyes as it does with an upturned frown.
If only Finn had more faith in the effect of his premise. Instead, his go-to method is the jump-scare. Sometimes it's a sudden noise in the dark or the abrupt appearance of a smiling predator, or an unexpected jump-cut into a new scene. Sometimes it's just the cat.
As the film piles on the jump scares, the body adjusts to the film's rhythm so that nothing short of a cannon blast could stimulate so much as a twitch. There will be some who disagree. But even if the jump-scares don't lose their impact, they are as effective of a tool in eliciting scares as tickling is in eliciting laughs.
The film stars Sosie Bacon (Kevin Bacon's and Kyra Sedgwick's daughter) as Dr. Rose Cotter, a dedicated psychologist dealing with trauma patients. Her compassion is tested to the extreme when a distressed woman arrives at the clinic. Cotter attempts but fails to talk the woman down from a psychotic episode, which ends in the woman's grisly suicide—complete with a killer smile.
Soon after, Cotter starts to spiral into her own psychosis, where ghost-like beings stare from dark corners of her home (a consistently underlit home), and familiar faces warp into grotesque creatures. Whatever curse pursued her client now belongs to her.
Those closest to Cotter, her fiancé (Jessie T. Usher), her sister (Gillian Zinser), and her boss (Kal Penn), watch helplessly as she descends into perceived madness. Only a police officer (Kyle Gallner), who also happens to be her ex, and a caring psychologist (Robin Weigert) sympathize. And then there is the prerequisite dark past involving her mother (Dora Kiss) that Cotter must come to terms with.
It's hard to determine Finn's intent (he is also the film's screenwriter). At times, the movie seems to strive beyond a smile and into a guffaw. This is particularly evident when depicting Cotter's psychological decline. Cotter is given to extremes, and to her credit, Bacon plays them to the hilt. The once kindly doctor who strongly objects to mental health slurs now defends herself by screaming, 'I'm not crazy!'.
Cotter wails and roars her defense (and her pain) with an intensity that leaves onlookers stunned and the audience laughing.
Finn is clearly a director with promise, but Smile is too inconsistent and relies too much on shock over suspense to be genuinely great.
Smile. Written and directed by Parker Finn. Stars Sosie Bacon, Jesse T. Usher, Gillian Zinser, Kal Penn, Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert, and Dora Kiss. Smile opens in select theatres Friday Sept. 30.