I always find myself appreciating low-to-mid budgeted genre titles, especially when the lesser resources force the filmmakers to employ a little extra ingenuity to successfully get their vision out to the movie-going masses.
With audiences seemingly falling out of love with the stupidly expensive ‘spectacle’ flicks (*see anything Marvel, for example), the 2020’s appear to have taken a step back and now many people are embracing some of these smaller, but effective horror / sci-fi / thriller titles, the ones that come with a modest price tag, but manage to successfully speak to both critics and audiences…and Smile is most certainly one of those. It’s a plucky lil horror title that came in with a budget of around $17 million…and ended up grossing a staggering $217 million at the world-wide box office in return!
Not too fuckin shabby for a movie that started off destined for a mere streaming release, huh.
I’d heard the positive online scuttlebutt attached to this one when it first snuck its way into theatres a few years back, but simply didn’t have the occasion to sear my eyeballs with it’s 1 hour and 55 minute run-time…till, purely by chance, I stumbled up a DVD copy during one of my usual foraging missions to my favourite thrift store. For a whopping 3 Canadian dollars, I scooped it up, intending to scribble something about it whenever the time came for me to toss it in.
Well, that time was 6am on a dark and foggy Sunday morning on the West coast of British Columbia, the day after Halloween. Waking up to dog girls needing toilet time in the Great Outdoors, I decided that sleep was overrated anyway, and that it was now time for a long overdue Early Morning Matinee. As the coffee was burbling away in the kitchen, I perused my stack of To Be Reviewed titles…and this one spoke to me the loudest, for some reason.
I mixed up a piping hot mug of mocha, stole a cheeky toke off the roach left over from last night’s pharmaceutical shenanigans, and tucked my K9 Warrior Princesses in before grabbing my trusty pad and pen and hitting PLAY.
Smile introduces us to psychiatric hospital mental-help therapist ‘Dr. Rose Cotter’ (Sosie Bacon) as she attempts to help a seemingly manic female patient named ‘Laura’ (Caitlin Stasey), who insists that something is trying to kill her, something no one else can see.
Before ‘Rose’ can succeed in her therapeutic efforts, ‘Laura’s demeanour abruptly alters and she gruesomely kills herself, after demonstrating some unnerving new behaviours. This rattles ‘Rose’, who was helpless to stop her, especially when strange evidence becomes credible and eerie events in her own existence begin sharing traits with the crazy-sounding story that led to her patient’s grisly demise. From there, everyone in her life, from her fiancé to her sister to her therapist to her cop ex-boyfriend, becomes affected by what appears to be a prolonged and potentially deadly mental breakdown, and ‘Rose’s grip on reality begins to fracture, be it through merciless demonic torment or a severe mental health crisis…or both.
Manic scribbles were unleashed…
-Kumar! Unexpected. I was not expecting to see the hilarious Kal Penn (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) turn up in a genuinely serious role…and yet, here he is, as our main character’s boss.
–Silence influence? Head-on close-ups. This was particularly noticeable in Act One, where it felt like Parker Finn was channeling his inner Jonathan Demme by using The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991) characteristic extreme close-ups that had Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster practically staring into the audience’s soul, to give the opening interactions of Smile that same unnerving directness to the character interactions, having them projecting the tension and fear onto us, making us involved.
-Yikes! First ‘smile’ scene genuinely fucked up. Don’t want spoil anything, but yeah…this one got my attention. Rather tone-setting, I would say. Ugh!
-That cat better not be doomed! Though I’m a dog-lover through and through, I do appreciate a nice feline as well…and there’s one here, named Moustache, belonging to ‘Rose’ and her fiancé ’Trevor’ (Jessie T. Usher). I did not have high hopes…but I did hope.
-Inter-racial. I approve. Bigotry, especially racism, is fucking stupid…so I always appreciate seeing mix-race couples onscreen who are not defined by the fact that they’re mixed race, just that they are two people in a loving adult relationship. Same applies to same-sex relationships, incidentally. The Message does NOT need to be loud and obnoxious to be effective…just hinted at, and treated as normal ‘in universe’. Here, ‘Rose’ is a white gal, while ‘Trevor’ just happens to be a black dude…and all is cool with that.
-Unsufferable friends / family. May they end up smiling. At first, I thought that ‘Holly’ (Gillian Zinser), who gets spoken of in dreaded tones prior to her intro, was just a friend, but I was mistaken, and she is, in fact, ‘Roses’ obnoxious materialistic ‘Karen’ of a sister. Before long…I was wishing bad things upon her.
-Appreciating the patient cinematography. Something Lynch-like about it. Parker Finn takes his time with his compositions, often letting the camera simply watch what’s transpiring, with a minimum of over-stylized camera tricks, though there are clever edits scatters throughout. David Lynch (Lost Highway) was very good about how he caught many of his iconic scenes, through minimal edits and effective performances that were simply allowed to play out via a static or slow-moving camera shot.
-Score = weird, unsettling, cool. Those three words really do sum it up. The score, by a composer named Cristobal Tapia de Veer, felt like an experiment in tones and cues, and I thought it worked well, adding to the already off-setting flavour of the narrative.
-Creepy security call. This was a good one, where ‘Rose’, while home alone, is abruptly startled by the security system somehow self-arming and triggering. As though that isn’t creepy enough, the dispatch call from the security company turns out to be not as helpful as ‘Rose’ may have hoped for.
-Oh, here we go. Of course, the cat’s MIA. So, yeeeeaaah…not looking great.
-Where’d that audio come from? This was a scene where ‘Rose’ was studying a recording of the audio from the suicide incident she failed to prevent…only there had been no indication (that I immediately recall) that any recording devices that could’ve recorded what she had with such clarity had been present and active. There’s an argument to be made regarding security cameras in mental institutes, but the sound quality was at odds with theory. Perhaps that answer lies in a deleted scene somewhere.
-‘Corporeal’. Good word. Meaning – ‘having a physical body’. Go ahead and add it to your vocabulary…it’ll help make you a better human being. True story.
-Oh shit! B-day from Hell! SO…that’s where the cat went. Who’s covering everyone’s therapy bill again?
-Sinister smiles everywhere. A production design choice I appreciated. Making ‘the benign’, even ‘the friendly’, into something to fear, to be weary of, takes a certain level of decorative and editorial skill and what we get works nicely, in that regard.
-She’s spiraling nicely. ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ rears it’s head yet again, as Sosie Bacon is the daughter of Hollywood power couple Kevin Bacon (Tremors) and Kyra Sedgwick (Born of the Fourth of July), who should be proud of the performance she gives here as the rapidly unravelling ‘Rose’.
-Lead actress solid. Parker Posey meets Tatiana Maslany. Before realizing that Sosie Bacon was a ‘Bacon’, I kept thinking I was seeing shades of those two actresses in there, from certain angles and mannerisms. But, after a moment’s online research, I could definitely see shades of her famous mom in there.
-Damn! Dude got face fucked! A victim has his face gorily rearranged and we get to see the aftermath. Not pretty.
-The ‘crazy’ label helps nothing. Given how ‘Rose’ comes across to everyone around her as her life swirls away, convincing anyone to take her rantings and spaz-outs even remotely seriously seems like a lesson in futility.
-Sisters clearing the air…or not. It looked like there was going to be some introspection, understanding and forgiveness between the already at-odds siblings…and then, it all goes to shit.
-Style = art-house horror. Pretty much.
-Called it. Fire. The focus on the lamp, kerosene and matches, in the abandoned house, all but screamed ‘Fire in the Near Future’. Not once, but twice do we get some good *whoomph!* action out of it.
-The head-fuckery continues. Act Three degenerates (in a good way) into a haunting round-and-round of hallucinatory brain fuckage that seems to want to drive ‘Rose’ to her bitter end, and beyond.
-Not bad at all. Pretty damn decent, actually.
All in all, Smile had me smiling.
In my humble opinion, this was an above-average entry into the ranks of low-to-mid budget genre fare and I had a good time finally checking it out…to the point where I’m now actively curious about the sequel…and, possibly, the third one that was just recently announced, at the time of this writing…assuming the second one doesn’t totally shit the bed and derail the potential, as established in this first impressive entry.
While not being anything super new or original, writer / director Parker Finn gave this ‘curse’ story its own ‘character’ through his effective cinematography and slow-burn editing, bolstered by a capable cast that understood the assignment and showed up every day, especially leading lady Sosie Bacon. The weird and unsettling score also went the extra mile to increase the overall Creep Factor and the scare types are not just limited to ‘jumps’, which is always refreshing.
If hauntings, demonic possession, and homicidal lunacy are your jam, then I can easily recommend that you give Smile a try.
It’ll bring a smile to your face!
