Ghost? Demon? Insensitive Metaphor? The Wasted Potential of Smile (2022)

I was doing a lot of things after this movie, but the title wasn’t one of them.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted here… and my first post back is a movie review, which I haven’t done before. But frankly, after that mess, I need to.

Perhaps one of the most painful things about Smile is the fact that, outside of the basic premise, it’s a good movie. The atmosphere is good, the acting is believable, the special effects are amazing (and largely practical effects, to my delight), and the scare factor is through the roof. (Seriously, that picture above is from a scene that I’m getting chills just thinking about.)

But ‘outside of the basic premise’ is the key phrase here–because the basic premise is horrible.

The movie starts off making you think it’s similar to Ring, which is a movie I love and thus one I was excited to see echoed in this. It seems at first to be some kind of demon or other evil supernatural force–in my head I was calling it the ‘smile demon’ because, well, that’s sort of the point. Maybe it was some angry ghost, I thought, or some kind of curse, passing itself from person to person like Sadako’s cursed tape. And of course, the only way to not be killed by it is to pass it on to someone else.

It’s hard watching the protagonist, Rose, suffer through all of this, all while everyone around her chalks it up to mental illness potentially inherited from her mother, who committed suicide in front of Rose when she was a little girl. Just believe her, I want to yell at the screen. This thing’s going to kill her!

The movie ramps up the tension as it makes it clear that this entity can masquerade as anything and anyone–whether that’s a phone call from her home security company asking her if she’s sure she didn’t let anything inside (“Look behind you…”) to her own therapist, mimicking her so well that Rose doesn’t realize until the real therapist calls her. (That image above is when the entity reveals itself, and it’s perhaps the most frightening smile in a movie based around creepy smiles.)

And then it drops the ball entirely with the revelation that the entity needs… trauma. Yeah. That’s right. The suicides have been orchestrated specifically to traumatize the witnesses so the entity can go after them and continue the cycle of violence–and if Rose doesn’t want to end up like the rest, the only thing she can do is commit murder.

We’re already getting into an issue here. The horror genre is infamous for demonizing mental illness, painting mentally ill people as dangerous and violent when in fact, they’re more at risk of being the victim than the perpetrator. And here we are with this entity forcing only traumatized people to commit acts of horrific violence.

It’s pretty obvious that it’s a metaphor for trauma, too, doing such things as waiting for Rose to take refuge in her childhood home and taking the form of her dead mother in order to torment her with the guilt she’s been burying her entire life, with such telling lines as “You can’t escape your own mind.” When she asks why it’s doing this to her, its response is simply to tell her that her mind is so inviting. The movie is blatant in its mimicry of many other such storylines, but with a particularly cruel twist at the end.

It goes through the classic ‘protagonist confronts the trauma monster and defeats it, enabling them to move on’ scene and takes Rose back to Joel, the one person who’s been staying by her side and helping her this whole time… only for him to say “I’ll stay with you… forever.” while that twisted smile crosses his face. Turns out, she never went back in the first place. She didn’t defeat the entity. She’s still in her childhood home, with it, and it literally pries her open and crawls inside her just as the real Joel shows up to try and save her–only to find her smiling as she pours gasoline over her head and lights a match, forcing him to witness her gruesome death and thus giving the entity a new victim.

In short, Rose never had a chance. From the moment it latched onto her, she was essentially a dead woman walking. Which would be fine, if it were really just a supernatural creature of some sort. But when you combine that with the obvious metaphor, it gives off a rather sickening message–that no matter what you do to try and deal with your trauma, it won’t work. You’re fighting the inevitable. And while it’s true that the effects of severe trauma can stay with you your whole life, the implication here is that you can’t escape it, ever. You can’t lessen the pain, no matter what you think. The fight is hopeless.

As someone with post-traumatic stress disorder myself, I hate that. Whether the message was intentional or not, it severely lessened my enjoyment of the movie, and frankly I think people should be considering the possibility of sending messages like that any time they try to work with this sort of metaphor. Or better yet, stop trying to work with it at all. More often than not it just ends up as a clumsy, insensitive mess being downright cruel towards people who have enough to deal with already.

In a tragic turn of events, Smile was an otherwise-well-done film that had the potential to become one of my favorite horror movies, were it not for this horrendous mishandling of a topic that’s already misunderstood and misrepresented.

So hey, movie directors?

Just make it a ghost next time.