{Fantastic Fest 2022} Smile

You know that favorite song from your youth. You blew it out all one summer. Memorized the words new the beats, where the snare came in. That song never goes away. Maybe as you grow older it slaps a little less. Its rotation in your mix goes way down. Its a good song. You have just heard it a thousand times before. That is how I feel about Smile. A movie that attempts to have a conversation about witnessing trauma without really discussing the mental health issues surrounding that trauma. It is familiar, and scary, and sometimes that is all you need.

This is the next iteration in fall horror movies with modest budgets over exceeding low expectations. I have seen them before. I will see them again. There is comfort in that old song and while the writing doesn’t always live up to the stellar performances put in by both Bacon and Kyle Gallner it adequately paces the movie and gets us to the monster reveal in a brisk fashion. This entire movie is built around the monster reveal that happens in the final fifteen minutes. The previous seventy five are worth it to check out the monster. More on that beast later.

Our lead Dr. Rose Cotter (played with incredible skill and talent by Sosie Bacon) is an overworked psychiatrist who happens to take the wrong patient at the wrong time and witnesses that patient kill herself. Not before that patient gives her a rambling confession that there is a smiling monster after her. Rose now has somewhere between 4 and seven days to figure out exactly what is causing people who have witnessed traumatic events from killing themselves. It becomes a bit of a chicken versus egg except its suicides as the first act unfolds.

Without getting too into the plot of the movie Smile uses a virus not entirely unlike It Follows that passes from one witness to the other. We get an interesting twist that Sossa herself has already had to witness something terrible. I felt like a natural way to discuss surviving trauma in a healthy and proactive fashion would be to shift the narrative to the idea that some trauma can provide us the necessary armor to get us through the next bad event. The movie is unwilling to really interrogate what trauma means to the survivors, and thus her previous trauma acts more as a force multiplier as opposed to a weapon.

The absolute standout of the entire production can be found in the creature design. Director Parker Finn indicated in the Q and A after the film that the design came from his original sketches from before the film was ever greenlit. The monster manages to come across as both grotesque but familiar. Like a monster from your childhood that just happened to grow up beside you. The film is at its absolute best when we get moments of ambiguity punctuated by the monster who always seems a not so friendly smile away from getting Rose.

The set design also helps create in Finn’s words ” A Kafkaesque approach to design”. Everything is smothered in institutional tans and pinks that somehow rachet up the stakes. In that way we might be able to squint and see a theme throughout this movie of institutional failure. The healthcare industry is especially under the microscope as Rose has a pesky hospital administrator (Kal Penn) who reminds her of the bottom line often. Penn’s mostly wasted here offering entirely believable sympathy but little else.

Smile isn’t groundbreaking. The performances are above average and major studio backing means it will be provided all of the opportunities to succeed. It should. Even our formulaic ghost stories still make us SMILE. Big Giant Smiles.

Smile comes out September 30th. Check it out late at night with a crowd. You will have a blast.