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"Smile" dir. by Parker Finn


"Smile"

A popcorn horror movie with a really solid analogy.

"Smile" if taken on a surface level is a run of the mill Friday night horror film with jump scares, drone shots of a car driving through the woods and of course, sub par acting (namely the dude in jail).

While it is all of these things, its also much deeper. The film serves as a representation of depression, trauma and suicide. It also very cleverly hides all of this behind "smiles" much like those dealing with these kinds of heavy emotions tend to do in the real world.

Trauma begetting more trauma is also a strong theme.

While I respect it for its subtext and creativity in doing so, I do feel like it did come across as a Blumhouse film which ultimately made me not care overly about the characters and had me rolling my eyes at the numerous predictable jump scares.

With its surface level horror device being creepy smiles, it's going to inherently be a bit divisive. It's like people that are afraid of clowns... some people find a scary clown terrifying, others find it silly and comical. I'm in the latter boat so the creepy smiles didn't instill any fear in me... just made me think about how awkward it might have felt for the actors.

There is a truly horrifying scene towards the end involving the main character's mother.

Ok, so... I've been wrestling with this since I saw the movie... It's no surprise that I would rather the movie be done more in the style of a "Hereditary" type film... but it's also clear that a lot of people don't like the slow burn, dramatic horror pieces. I've seen comments on Facebook groups about movies like "The Vvitch" and "Hereditary" saying stuff like, "boooooring," "not enough jump scares," "it doesn't make any sense." For those people, making "Smile" the way I wanted would have meant losing the message or worse... losing viewers entirely. By making it a Blumhouse-esque movie, it guarantees that more people will see the movie and therefore the delivery of its powerful allegories can be spread amongst a wider crowd... which is obviously awesome and a much better thing to leave with rather than a handful of horror snobs such as myself raving about it in our basements. So for that I think the ends justify the means.

Overall, I'm glad it exists.

7/10

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