Smile (2022) + Smile 2 (2024)

SMILE
***/****
starring Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert
written and directed by Parker Finn

SMILE 2
***½/****
starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Kyle Gallner
written and directed by Parker Finn

by Walter Chaw I was distracted by what I saw as the narrative looseness of Parker Finn’s Smile, based on his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept. I thought it made a bit of a splash for a high concept carried obsessively–the titular smile maybe really just the Kubrick stare: lowered brow, manic grin. Although I admired the craft of it and Sosie Bacon’s star turn as a traumatized shrink with a troubled past seemingly losing her mind in the wake of a patient’s suicide, I dismissed the picture as thin and forgettable. But it nags and tugs, enough so that I started to wonder if I’d judged it too quickly and too harshly. I revisited Smile after watching its sequel; I realized I’d misplaced a few of the story details and flat-out forgotten the rest, and I wanted to give both films a fair accounting. Smile is two things: it’s a short film’s high concept expanded to feature length that may have one too many subplots; and it’s a solemn, principled piece on suicidal ideation and the theory it can be passed on–triggered, if you will–like other mental health crises such as eating disorders. Could someone in recovery from a self-annihilating disorder be pulled back into active crisis through exposure to someone else in the throes of the beast?

The short film, Laura Hasn’t Slept, doesn’t have much of the lore Finn begins to develop in Smile. There, Laura (Caitlin Stasey) tells her therapist, Dr. Parsons (Lew Temple), about a recurring dream in which an “it” with strange eyes, wearing a people face, stalks her. Turns out that Laura might actually be in the middle of one of her nightmares as we speak. The short’s an obvious ripper of Stephen King’s “The Boogeyman” from his Night Shift collection, down to the monster wearing a “Dr. Harper” mask to trick a hapless patient. Stasey’s Laura returns in Smile as a PhD student committing herself to the hospital where dedicated Dr. Rose Cotter (Bacon) (over)works, telling her a tale of an “it” stalking her during her waking hours while wearing the “masks” of random NPCs in her world: “Sometimes it pretends to be someone that I know. Sometimes it’s a random stranger. Sometimes it looks like my grandfather, who died in front of me when I was seven. But it’s all the same thing.” Dr. Cotter asks the right questions about family histories of mental illness, new stresses, medications. She says the right things about hallucinations and how they seem very real to the sufferer but are often indicative of a multitude of mental and physical ailments. Laura says she sees the thing in the room with them. She freaks out. When Dr. Cotter turns back after calling for help, she finds Laura calm again and smiling at the good doctor in an unnerving way as she cuts her own throat with a porcelain shard.

The first time through, I was reminded of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, a wonderful horror movie that has as its monster a metaphor for sexual stigma and guilt. Said monster is invisible to others and inexorable, manifesting in various forms both familiar and unfamiliar to the object of its attention. Like the bogey in Smile, the “it” that follows is a contagion passed on through the specific behaviours of the victims. I think my process of noting its antecedents distracted me from what Smile could really be about: not Dr. Cotter’s traumatic childhood, but suicidal depression as an affliction forever gestating, now dormant/now active, capable of being aroused by random, unpredictable provocations. My belief I had a handle on it definitely discouraged me from any deeper speculation into the creepy-smile thing as something besides an eventually overused gimmick. But smiles, especially expansive, disingenuous smiles, are worth considering and contextualizing. While the Joker character is the key touchstone in modern iconography, there are also the masks in Kabuki and Noh theatre and Conrad Veidt’s Gwynplaine from Paul Leni’s German Expressionist masterpiece, The Man Who Laughs (1928). German Expressionism as a movement arises during a turbulent period between wars in a nation soon to be twice conquered. Fascism is on the rise, apocalyptic hedonism and transgression rule the hours between midnights, and the art used to express it all is exaggerated, misshapen, desperately insincere. Life is a cabaret, old chum.

The smiles of people under siege take on a particularly desperate affect: the veins pop at the temple, a tear gathers at the corner of a crazed eye…and is that trembling from the pressure to maintain it? I wonder if the smile in these films isn’t meant to be a commentary on the impossibility of maintaining a semblance of real contentment beneath the barrage of life’s sadness. More specifically, I wonder if the smile isn’t about the masking depressed people do to spare others the burden of taking on their sorrows. After Laura kills herself, Dr. Cotter is put on administrative leave for her erratic behaviour towards another patient and general signs of exhaustion. The first person to think she’s crazy is her boss (Kal Penn). She starts to see things at home and brandishes a knife in a panic against her boyfriend, Trevor (Jessie T. Usher)–the next person to think she’s crazy. Then it’s her therapist (Robin Weigert), who suggests they resume regular sessions upon refusing to prescribe her Risperdal, a drug generally used to treat mood disorders. Following a therapy session, Dr. Cotter practises smiling in the mirror. Not because she’s taking on the mantle of the demon stalking her, but to see if she can still pretend to be all right in polite company.

At her nephew’s seventh birthday party, she starts experiencing aural hallucinations. When he opens her present to him, it’s Dr. Cotter’s dead cat. She begs the guests at the party to believe it wasn’t her, and Finn takes pains to show everyone frozen in horror and pity. Now a patient in an examining room, Dr. Cotter looks at a chart asking visitors to rank their pain on a numeric scale accompanied by “happy face” doodles expressing various levels of stoic bemusement. She recognizes the happy face the monster wears as commensurate with the “0 – No Pain” rating. “I’m really scared something bad is going to happen,” Dr. Cotter says to her boyfriend, and Trevor has no idea how to reply. When I’ve been suicidally depressed in my life, I have largely resisted telling loved ones how afraid I was that something was going to happen, owing to my fear that they would have as little to say as Trevor does. What can you say but that you must find help, you must persist, you must survive? At the halfway point of Smile, Dr. Cotter looks down at her wrists (freshly bandaged after she’s fallen through a glass table at her sister’s house), looks at her boyfriend sleeping on her couch, and goes on the Internet to follow the trail of suicides that have led her to this place. As she’s searching, a voice from a black void calls to her. Smile is an exceptionally perceptive, empathetic, even devastating portrait of mental illness. I wonder if a lot of my resistance to it initially had to do with my fear of being triggered by material like this. What are the lyrics to that Vic Chestnutt song? “Oh Death,” he says, “I’ve flirted with you all my life/Even kissed you once or twice/And to this day I swear it was nice/But clearly I was not ready.”

Past the midpoint, Smile becomes something else. Dr. Cotter turns private investigator: interrogating the widow of a former victim; enlisting the help of amorous ex-boyfriend/current cop Joel (Kyle Gallner) to pull up dead case files and surveillance tapes; interviewing a convict (Rob Morgan) who survived the infection somehow… Which is not to say there aren’t exceptional moments here and again. I love Dr. Cotter’s attempt at convincing her sister (Gillian Zinser) that she isn’t nuts, even though she’s just gifted her nephew a dead cat, and I love how she deals with her boyfriend staging an intervention for her with her therapist. What I liked less is the sharp turn the movie takes into a two-hander domestic horror: the woman regressing to the abused child and confronting the metaphorical monstrous mother in the dreamscape of an abandoned childhood home. Dr. Cotter’s attempt to cleanse herself of her trauma is understandable, yet in the process of it, her expertise, her insight and emotional intelligence, are set aside for a brief catharsis and a horror-flick epilogue. She doesn’t learn anything in her extended odyssey to do so, in other words–she simply goes through the genre motions until we hit the page count. Still, the meat on this bone is complex and laden, all the minutiae of a good but broken person borne out by Bacon in one of the great modern examinations of the mercurial faces of self-harm.

Six days later, as Smile 2 begins, Joel is trying to pass on the “curse” to a pair of lowlife thugs dealing drugs out of a boarded-up den on the wrong side of town. Things go wrong, ridiculous schlub Lewis (Lukas Gage) gets cursed by accident instead, and Charlie Sarroff’s visceral, curt, blue-hued cinematography serves as inheritor of Alex Nepomniaschy’s steely work on Joe Carnahan’s Narc. Lewis is the sometime drug dealer of pop superstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who’s some kind of cross between Lady Gaga and Doja Cat. We’re introduced to her as she goes on Drew Barrymore’s show to apologize to her fans for a dark period of drug addiction, cancelled performances, and a fatal car accident that claimed her boyfriend, Paul (Ray Nicholson). While rehearsing an intricate dance number, Skye pulls up short, her heavily scarred back and torso–souvenirs from the accident–reminding her that all is not well. On the wagon since the accident, Skye, in order not to let down her mom and manager Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), seeks out Lewis for some painkillers to get her through an exhausting schedule. The first thing that’s immediately apparent in Smile 2 is how Finn has evolved in a short period of time as a filmmaker. The scale is larger, but the focus stays on Skye as she deals with her part in the death of a lover–a tragedy that rears its head every time she disappoints herself, her mom, her fans, and her friends. She’s haunted by expectations and ruined by success. She’s trapped by her ambition and forced to deal with the toll her appetites have taken on those around her. The film is of a piece with contemporaries Apartment 7A and The First Omen: tales of young women inaugurated against their will–against their knowledge–into ancient cycles of sacrifice to a voracious audience of acolytes and cultists. After Skye gets juiced up again for the first time, she attends a fan meet-and-greet, and Finn and Sarroff mount the camera a few inches from her face, dazed and shellshocked, as a team of makeup artists and assistants fluff her up physically and emotionally. A visitor enters, and Skye immediately paints on a dazzling smile.

Smile 2 is superior to Smile in much the same way Scream 2 is better than Scream: whatever was vague or out of focus in the first film is either discarded or refined. There’s not much fat on this one. Its backstage melodrama, dwelling on the insupportable weight of performance, places it in glorious company with Beyond the Lights and Black Swan, and its dissection of depression and its manifold manifestations takes on the trial of being a public person experiencing a personal meltdown. Watching Smile 2, I thought a lot about Britney Spears shaving her head, about the cruel struggles of Amanda Bynes–about the ways in which we delight in the downfall of young women after we’re done exploiting them for our pleasure. Skye is wonderful with her fans, even the creeper who has an opinion on her skin, a conviction he would be great for her, and a need to be dragged away by security. She poses for a picture and gracefully weathers the full burden of carrying on an awkward interaction with an unsettling young fan (Margot Weintraub) who stares at her, voiceless, with a big, stiff smile. I know within the context of the film that this is the first hint the demon has been passed from Dr. Cotter to Joel to Lewis to Skye, though out of context, this is Skye as a decent person being exceedingly kind to a kid who’s either developmentally disabled or paralyzed by meeting her idol or both. The second time through this film, I looked at the fan’s chaperone and discovered that Finn may have taken a cue from the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers in suggesting subtle horrors in the inhuman actions of the background extras. Smile 2′s paranoia is neither as pervasive nor as consistent as that of Philip Kaufman’s masterpiece, but it’s not messing around, either. It’s carefully thought-out, and for as good as Bacon was in the first film, Scott matches her in the second.

Read Smile 2 as a further treatise on suicide; read it with as much profit as an incisive exposé on how pretending to be one person for millions of people erodes an individual’s ability to remember who they used to be. Skye is grieving her boyfriend, sure, but moreover, she’s grieving her sense of self and the best parts of her, which she’s bartered in exchange for wealth and adulation. Watch the scene where Skye reconciles with old friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula, who essayed a similar character in Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell). Watch how vulnerable Skye is in her apology, how Gemma deflects it while accepting it–how this standard exposition scene setting up the second half of the film creates a compelling friendship between two flawed people who have clearly let each other down but remain friends at the bottom of it all. Skye continues her decline. She has terrible flashbacks to the accident, bombs legendarily at a charitable gala when her teleprompter stalls, and finds herself in the stadium pop-rock version of Cassavetes’s Opening Night. She goes viral for a public ramble, her lipstick smeared like a caricature of a drunk woman: “You’ll spend years of your life chasing success, thinking that when it comes, it will magically fix everything that’s bad and wrong about you. And then you achieve success and you realize that it can’t fix the deeply broken person that you have always been.” Finn locates her horror at her own humiliation in an extreme close-up that turns into a slow pan to Skye hiding in her giant walk-in closet beneath a garish painting of two tigers in a jungle-scape, looking at her telephone and wondering how she can take it all back in an age where everyone isn’t merely famous for 15 minutes, they’re notorious. The best sequence may be the one where Skye watches, helpless through FaceTime, as someone moves through their apartment in search of a smile. Best because it’s especially scary, yes, but also because it presents our world as mediated and the world of this picture, from here to the end, as entirely manipulated by a director willing to be a conspicuous force in his work.

The film’s last hour plays out a bit like The Frighteners and a bit more like Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners. If I were to compare Finn as a stylist to anyone, in fact, it might be Schumacher at his most formally audacious. As Skye begins to lose it, note how the camera becomes predatory: stalking, swooping in circles, following Skye’s arm motion, following her point-of-view when a phantom visible only to her lurches in her periphery. There is no shot as extravagantly playful as the introduction to the theatre in Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera, but in a “traffic light game” chase after Sky takes another dose of happy pills, Finn comes delightfully, deliriously close. He’s mastered the uncanny. The smiles at this point aren’t to mask depression, necessarily–rather, they’re the tools of performers, and wouldn’t it be horrifying to learn that everyone in your life is paid to be there, playing the roles of people who like you and enjoy your work? There are scenes that reminded me of Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna, Bernard Rose’s Candyman, and the nightmare from Day of the Dead, yet the whole of it doesn’t seem like a sum of parts. Smile 2 is an intelligent genre picture and a worthy showcase for an actor to portray a range of difficult, ugly emotions. It’s a maximalist exercise in introspection. It is, at its heart, of a league with the theatrical musings, the supernatural apparitions, the personal failings of the young given power and knowledge too soon, of Hamlet. I should mention how long and hard I laughed at a sight gag when Skye tries to disguise that she’s covered in gallons of blood with an oversized hoodie and a head start. I didn’t think I’d like Smile 2, but I liked it enough that it inspired me to reconsider the first one. It doesn’t usually go that way.