Dear people who made the 2022 horror film Smile: I hate you.
It isn’t that your movie is derivative. That’s to be expected from a horror movie. Sure, Smile‘s writer/director Parker Finn (expanding on his 2020 short film Laura Hasn’t Slept) copies a scenario very much like The Ring and It Follows. The story involves a chain of deaths in which somebody starts to see evil, smiling faces everywhere, whether as hallucinations or as versions of people in the real world. Much like It Follows, the creepy visions only appear to the next victim in the viral chain, and like The Ring, there’s a timeline of roughly a week (or less) before the victim will die and/or pass their curse to another person.
And sure, Smile also borrows heavily from the tone and feel of Ari Aster’s next-level horror dramas Hereditary and Midsommar. The soon-to-be victim, played by Sosie Bacon, has a suppressed personal trauma that the evil spirit in Smile taps into. She might even have repressed guilt about her role in that trauma, though Smile fails to develop that part of her backstory. And, much as in Midsommar, the creeping dread isn’t just based in a malevolent, evil force, but in the realization that her significant other, played by Jessie T. Usher, doesn’t care about her when it really matters.
And no, I don’t hate the people who made Smile because of what happens to the cat. Though please, next time you feature a sweet, likely-to-die pet in a horror movie’s early scenes, can you make it an iguana or Chihuahua or something? (I’m still holding a grudge against Alison Lohman for what she did to that kitten in 2009’s Drag Me to Hell.)
No, I don’t care that Smile uses one too many jump scares, or relies too heavily on “it’s a dream” trickery, where everything seems to be okay but then we find out the main character was hallucinating and, nope, everything’s not okay and we’re back at the moment of peril. I mean, okay, can horror-film directors get a new bag of tricks already? Or should I accept that they’re just going to say “Boo!” all the time and get used to it? (How about putting the “it was a dream” frustration at the end like 2005’s The Descent did in the U.K. version, and then cutting it out of the film later for wimpy U.S. audiences?)
Forgiveness could be granted to the main character’s lack of an action plan. If you know you’re doomed on a deadline, likely to commit self-harm involuntarily, why not arrange to tie yourself up and get a friend to spoon-feed you and keep you safe? You have options. Sure, such plans never work out, or they lead to absurd third acts like the swimming pool scene for It Follows. But it’s gotta be better than going to your abandoned childhood home and wandering around in the dark with a gas-powered lantern.
I don’t even hate the movie because it stars Sosie Bacon, who ruins the six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game by being only one step removed from Kevin Bacon (since she’s his daughter), and taking all the fun out of that mental exercise. Bacon, also the daughter of actress Kyra Sedgwick, is all too effective in her role, starting as a calmly professional therapist and slowly unraveling into a nervous wreck after one of her patients (Caitlin Stasey) tells her about the smile curse, shortly before turning into a grinning, suicidal freak in Bacon’s office.
The reason I hate you, you makers of Smile, so very much is: Despite the derivative premise, and the obvious jump scares, the repetitive dream tricks, and that poor kitty, your movie is freaking scary. Not only freaking scary, but scary in a way that taps directly into basic, primal childhood fears — of the dark, of rejection, and of one’s most trusted and familiar relationships inexplicably becoming sadistically wicked.
On top of it all, you went and ruined happy faces. You horrible people. I frown in your general direction.
