After witnessing a patient’s gruesome suicide, Dr. Rose Cotter’s (Sosie Bacon) life is turned upside down by the sinister appearance of the ubiquitous ‘smile’ of the film’s title. The strange and violent occurrences pile up, setting Rose on a collision course with the haunting memory of her mother’s suicide.
Right, so in the interest of transparency it seems correct to drop the flowery prose and say that this film is quite stupid. Its premise is the best thing about it. A premise in execution that can be summed up by the conclusive metaphor of bludgeoning yourself to death with a hammer. Following the suicide, Rose experiences hallucinations, and creepy weird shit happens (dead cat birthday present). Her partner Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinser) abandon her with somewhat minor provocation. Naturally, when our loved ones start acting oddly our first instinct is to cut them out of our lives! I could buy this symbolically for the isolation of traumatic stress. However, it’s mostly used as a plot device that abjures the script from the task of characterization in numerous endless and repetitive scenes of Rose trying to convince her loved ones to listen to her.
Rose eventually allies with a police detective who does believe her. Joel (Kyle Gallner), a cardboard cut-out of the finest variety, is the generic pre-requisite for Rose’s investigations. Then there’s Dr. Desei (Kal Penn) Rose’s supervisor at the hospital. Dr. Desei is so devoid of life he could have been played by a dead pot plant. His lines consist wholly of (repetitive) scenes where he tells Rose to take a rest. The scares are repetitive too. Characters smile that evil smile and then do something fucked up. Over and over and over again. It’s difficult to understand why this film needed to be nearly 2 hours long when one considers its totally tapped for ideas after about 30 minutes. As a vehicle to explore the real-world effects of trauma it could have been so much more. It’s a rich topic, universally relatable, endlessly frightening, and sometimes life affirming. What we have instead is a hammy not-so-scary festival of never-ending cynicism and repetitive scenes topped off by an ending that might make you want to become unalive yourself. If the teaser trailer for Smile 2 is any indication, the sequel is offering more of the same.
Cine Obscura. 