The horror movie 'Smile,' in which a therapist catches a curse from a patient, expands its simple premise by focusing on genre tropes and trends.
pioneered a technique in the film “Cat People” that’s now referred to as the “Lewton Bus.” If you’ve ever seen a horror movie, you know it: a moment of slowly building tension that culminates in some shrieking noise from a source that is revealed to be harmless but sends the popcorn flying nevertheless — a ringing phone, a home alarm system, the brakes on a bus. It’s a technique that Finn liberally abuses in “Smile,” almost to comedic effect.
In the way that “Smile” takes on trauma as a source of horror so literally, one wonders if Finn is skewering the trend of ascribing all meaning in horror films to “it’s about trauma” . The main character in “Smile,” Rose Cotter , is a therapist who catches the curse from a young woman in the throes of a debilitating mental health crisis after witnessing a suicide.
Finn continually walks a line in “Smile” making us wonder if the movie is just dumb, or so dumb it’s looped back around to smart again. Finn casts, the preeminent portrayer of therapists , as Rose’s own therapist, who speaks to her in soothing, infuriating tones that eventually take on a menacing quality. When Finn delves into the childhood trauma that Rose has yet to make peace with, it is visualized and rendered so literally it’s laughable.
Ultimately, that we never really know the answer to that question, and that the ending settles for a sequel possibility that betrays the film’s own interior logic, indicates that no, “Smile” isn’t entirely in on the joke, or at least willing to show that it is. However, Bacon’s performance as well as Finn’s detailed craft manage to hold tension, and the audience’s attention, for the nearly-two-hour runtime of this horror curio, which is as opaque and somewhat silly as the smiles that drive it.
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