Stand-up comic Brian Regan has a bit about walking into spiderwebs:
The routine is silly and over-the-top, but as with most topics covered by Regan’s observational, Seinfeld-esque style, it is of course true and universal. It keys into a certain streak of psychological horror: a character going through major turmoil and looking like a crazy person to everyone around them.
The ultimate in looking like an idiot is when you walk into a spiderweb. ‘Cause nobody else sees that spiderweb. They just see you walking off in the distance, suddenly flipping out for no reason whatsoever.
What Is So Scary About Smile?
Paramount Pictures
In filmmaker Parker Finn’s terrifying Smile, as it is in many similar films, the protagonist is a woman who endures various forms of gaslighting and whose troubles, both supernatural and psychological, are never taken seriously. The difference with Sosie Bacon’s Dr. Rose Cotter is that she is a therapist and a gaslighter herself.
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“I know that what you’re experiencing feels real,” she says early on to a disturbed patient. These words, intended to be empathic, end up pitting patient against doctor, and per the film’s pseudo-karmic surrealism, and ultimately boomerang all the way back to her. By the time she realizes how wrong she was, it’s already too late. The universe is smiling, having played one big cosmic joke on her, and it’s the cruelest one possible.
What is it about the smile itself that is so creepy? Maybe it’s just that the act of staring at somebody and doing nothing but smiling is simply so uncanny as to suggest a predatory motive. But then, there is the idea that a smile suggests a dirty secret or disturbing transgression. There is something naughty and knowing in these smiles, which, when coupled with silence, suggest that Dr. Cotter is not in on the joke, and thus out of the loop. The smilers are not just smiling; they’re also laughing. And Rose is the one walking into spiderwebs.
The Scares of Smile Are Based on Perspective
More so than other atmospheric horror films in the same camp, Smile presents a particular uneasiness of tone. It is deeply troubling but utterly preposterous, heavy but light, gut-wrenching but comical. One moment, we might be stuck in Dr. Cotter’s subjectivity, scared out of our freaking minds. The next moment, director Finn will cut out to a wide shot so that we’ll see the outside perspective: how unhinged she looks.
One particular sequence, wherein Rose is confronted by a vision of her sister’s “unscrewed” head, exemplifies this duality, because it is followed by a third-person wide shot, with Rose screaming in her car, nothing supernatural in sight. Here, we experience both sides of Brian Regan’s spiderwebs joke – the feeling crazy, and the looking crazy.
But Smile also doesn’t do what a comedy would. Upon cutting wide, Finn doesn’t drop the music out to underline the absurdity of Rose’s visions; rather, he keeps the music and tension going, as if to say something can be both imaginary and real, and that one doesn’t necessarily negate the other. Similarly, Regan’s spiderweb is real, which doesn’t make it any less funny for the onlooker, but also doesn’t make it any less upsetting for the person walking through it.
How Fake Imagery Becomes Real Horror
In these respects, in addition to crafting an energetic horror film, Parker Finn has also enabled a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of entertainment and the images we consume. Going into a narrative film, the audience presumably knows that it is all artificial, created from the ground up, and that nothing is captured as it actually is. And yet, we react to it as though it were real life.
To bring it further into the horror genre, we intellectually know that these images are fake, and yet they often terrify us (how else can one explain the jump scare?), haunting us as though they were genuine memories. The horrific images of Smile, brought out by a combination of realism and painterly affectation, epitomize this idea, and begin to blur the line between what is real and what is imagined.
Bear Witness to the Smile
Perhaps due to its relative rarity in the horror lexicon, the idea of ghosts who do nothing but smile at their victims is even more patently absurd than haunted houses or zombie apocalypses. But now, we’ve seen it and are cursed with the knowledge that it could exist, just as Rose is cursed by the act of bearing witness to a horrific incident in the film’s opening moments. Before this movie, the smiling ghost would have been the furthest thing from our mind; after the movie, it haunts our thoughts. Who are we to say there isn’t some stranger smiling over our shoulder as we pound away at the keyboard in our living room, only for them to disappear the second we turn around to look?
Smile certainly isn’t the most revolutionary piece of horror ever made, but it is different from the rest in that its images are ones that are made to stay with us. They subsume the film’s performances, confused tone, and meditations on mental illness. Smile focuses not on clever plot mechanics or thematic potency; rather, it aims to celebrate the pure opera of horror in the spirit of Dario Argento. If Hell had its own Sistine Chapel, this is probably what it would look like.
