cw: mental illness, suicide, trauma
Ever had someone tell you to cheer up when you’re not feeling happy? Maybe they’re someone close to you and you just got done explaining the hows and whys of you not feeling happy, or maybe it’s some complete rando who sees you looking a little glum out in public. But all the same, they see you in distress and think to say that you simply shouldn’t be so down, as if you had never thought of that as an option before.
It’s the kind of advice that is arguably well-intentioned… but there’s a certain effect that comes with it. At its best, it can feel like you’re not allowed to have your own feelings, your own reactions to what’s going on, and that you just need to stop whining and put on a happy face, if not for yourself than to at least not inflict your ‘bad vibes’ on others.
But at worst, especially when it comes packaged with that same person showing off how their own forced happy face looks, there’s something almost malevolent to it. You’re feeling bad, and here’s someone just… smiling at you. Wanting you to do the same, whether you feel like it or not. And if you live with a chronic mental health condition, where these moods are a regular part of your life, all that insistence to force that happy face can feed into the much darker companions that those conditions tend to magnetise. You must be ‘normal’… or else. Or else what?
After how much of a hard time I gave Truth Or Dare for its own grinning bogeyman, I was expecting this little viral number to hit the same point of laughable failure… but as you’ve just read, there’s a familiar effect to it this time around. That same paranoid malevolence pushed even further, creating a presence that isn’t smiling so that you might reciprocate… but because it knows you don’t want to. A wide-toothed glee at the thought of you in torment, of you frantically trying to escape it, while the people ostensibly trying to help you only making everything worse.
Of course, it helps that it doesn’t look like a shitty Instagram filter.
The story wrapped around that vicious Smile is made up of a lot of familiar parts. Its main menace taking the form of everyday people and just following the victim around is similar to the It from It Follows. Its structure, showing psychiatrist Rose (Sosie Bacon) following the bread-crumb trail of the people this… thing has terrorised before her, follows the frantic quasi-detective progression of The Ring’s later developments; even its method of transmission hits a lot of the same points. The Smile transferring from person to person, like a contagion, feels similar to the abstract psychosomatic premise of She Dies Tomorrow. And with how much it focuses on mental health explicitly (rather than implicitly as the result of ‘you’re being crazy’ reactions when a horror protagonist tries to tell others about what they’re dealing with), it reminded me a fair bit of Lights Out as well.
However, while this undoubtedly wears its influences on its sleeve, that ultimately becomes a non-issue because how well those influences are combined and presented here. Sosie Bacon is fucking incredible in the lead, expertly balancing the nerve-racked experience of being haunted by this thing, while making it fit alongside her character’s trained expertise in mental health. The production values around her are doing everything in their power to bring out just how nervy this story is for the person at its center, with Charlie Sarroff’s long camera takes combining with the expertly-timed edits from Elliot Greenberg to create jump scares that, surprisingly, actually work. With the emphasis placed on tension and drawing things out, the jumps feel less like acts of desperation and more like sudden and appropriate jarring breaks in the atmosphere. Like the borrowed story elements, it takes an older idea and fleshes it out to make it breathe again.
And then there’s the soundtrack… holy shit, is there the soundtrack. I’ve already gotten into how much I love weird and noisy soundscapes in movies, but what Cristobal Tapia de Veer has cooked up might be one of the best examples of this style of soundtrack that I’ve covered. For a start, it’s divorced from the jump scares; whatever sudden noises accompany the cuts are diegetic, rather than being some stupid stab of strings. For another, its distorted, glitchy, and rumbling textures build on the nervous atmosphere surrounding Rose, making even those divorced sudden noises feel part of the tension. And for a third, when combined with the cinematography, editing, and that terrifying Smile, it adds to an overwhelming feeling that there is something very wrong about this. That undefinable but tangible sensation where, even though you can’t put your finger on exactly what or how, you can’t escape the feeling that something terrible is about to happen.
But bar none, the thing that most impressed me about all this is how well its take on mental health turns out in its entirety. That bringing out of the stereotypical horror protagonist gaslighting to the forefront shows genre savvy, and not the ‘we know we’re in a movie lol’ kind that annoys some audiences, which ends up mingling quite well with the bigger messaging on offer here. Outside of Rose’s own line of work (and hell, even among those within it), there’s a pointedly glib approach towards those with mental illnesses. They’re the crazies, the damaged, the people who need to be kept under lock and key for their own good. It can get rather aggravating seeing so many characters here just disregard others (or worse, use it as fuel to attack each other), but the film frames it just right to point out that these people are part of the larger problem. I mean, if they’re acting this shitty about people with everyday mental health problems, it’s no wonder they completely shut away from the more abstract shit tied into the Smile.
As for the film’s larger depiction of mental health and trauma in particular, it’s an incredibly bleak depiction of how that kind of damage not only follows people around but seems to spread in particularly graphic circumstances. However, it more than earns that bleakness, and I’d argue that this did exactly what Lights Out should have done. Where Lights Out ultimately succumbed to that attitude of trying to put on a brave face, but in effect only making things worse, there are no such concessions made here. Trauma is a thing that a lot of us have to live with; we don’t have the luxury of a planned story to bring us to moments of closure. Sure, it is possible to find those moments in our own lives, and with the right treatments, living with it can be made bearable… but not everyone gets that. And even if they do, that still isn’t an iron-clad guarantee that nothing bad will happen. Not everyone who takes up that fight ends up winning it. It’s tragic, it’s heartbreaking, it’s genuinely horrifying… but that’s the reality of it. If life was fair, mental illness wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Okay, okay, I know that (even for me) this is getting into some heavy shit, but this is a particularly heavy film. While I could argue that it being derivative of so many other horror films robs it of some of its impact, the extent to which its presentation and raw understanding of the subject matter make up for that is frankly staggering. No joke, on my walk home from the cinema, I looked up and saw a bright white quarter-moon grinning down on me… and I’m not gonna lie, I was terrified for a bit there. This is a highly effective horror flick that does justice to a topic that a lot of other horror flicks take for granted, and for as much as I truly enjoyed the experience, I respect it even more.
Actually, since I’m already talking about the struggle that is dealing with mental health problems and trauma, I think it’s time I offered up an olive branch for a film I’ve already brought up a couple times in this review. Quite frankly, I need to stop giving Lights Out such a hard time. I bring it up every so often to highlight what I consider to be a horrifying (and not in the way a horror film would warrant) miscalculation in making a film because… well, I wasn’t prepared for a film to validate some of my darkest impulses, while convincing me that it knew what living with them was like up to that point. That shock has stayed with me in the seven years since I saw it in cinemas, and part of me has been unable to get past it. The main reason I made a big point of writing about not seeing Shazam! is that, believe it or not, that character is tied into another part of my personal mental health history; as an auteurist, seeing David F. Sandberg’s name attached to both was just too much for me. But considering this is all my baggage that I need to deal with, taking it out on David F. Sandberg or anyone else involved with it isn’t fair on them or me.
Don’t get me wrong, I probably still have some shit to get past before I can watch Shazam! or its upcoming sequel… but watching this film reminded me that chances for closure are rare, and if one presents itself, it’s worth grabbing with both hands. The Smile will always be out there, but that doesn’t mean we all have to lose to it.
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