If you’ve seen the previews for the film, Smile, you kind of know what you’re going to get. If you haven’t seen them? I suggest you skip the trailer and wait until you get this monstrous, chilling thing in front of your eyes.
There’s not a whole lot to the plot for me to explain. An overworked, underpaid, unappreciated therapist at a mental hospital interviews a troubled young woman that complains something is haunting her. When the therapist doesn’t believe her, the woman has a fit, and commits suicide while wearing a creepy, all too wide, all too sinister smile. From then on, things get kind of weird.
Recent paranormal/supernatural horror movies that have demonic or ghostly elements to them usually try and explain what the demon is, or why it is attached to the people it terrorizes. Smile attempts to explain absolutely nothing. Smile is much more interested in what is happening to the main character and her frantic desperation than providing a convoluted mythos. In a way, the film is very much a re-imagining of Ringu, or The Ring, as it is known in the states. Instead of focusing on disjointed anecdotes with multiple characters, however, Smile is singularly focused on the therapist and no one else.
We see and hear the world from an unreliable narrator of her own story. While events continue to unfold and her life unravels a single strand at a time, she disassociates more and more from reality leaving us to wonder exactly what is real and what isn’t. It works phenomenally well. One would think this film would be filled with jump scares, but it’s really not. It loves slow, long pans, moody, suspenseful lighting, and discordant music that I’ve already added to my soundtrack fave list.
Smile is the type of story I would write as a novel. It focuses on the psychological aspects of drifting into that realm between delusion and reality and an intelligent mind desperate to find a way out. Back to sanity where those around you act normal, where the walls don’t bend or breathe, and nothing talks to you from beneath the bed in the granite dust choked voice of the deceased. In addition to all of this? I heartily approve of the film’s ending.
Make no mistake, this is a horror suspense film best watched with the lights off while sharing a couch with a friend or loved one. I suggest you give them a brilliant smile halfway through the film to make them feel uncomfortable all night. All it takes is opening your mouth and let evil do the grinning for you.