A young woman explains that she is being stalked by maliciously smiling figures, and then cuts her throat. 90,000 moviegoers in Switzerland wanted to know why she did it.
A smile drives people to suicide: The psychologist Rose (Sosie Bacon) is required. Scene from «Smile».
The mentally damaged person as a prophet, as a seismograph for coming disaster: This idea has been driving literature and film for a long time and provides the background for a dramaturgy with which a social center can examine its pathological edges.
It doesn’t always have to be the horror genre. Film dramas like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or “Girl, Interrupted” (Angelina Jolie’s Oscar role) recognize the otherness of society in the fundamentally disturbed. If the superego is switched off, creative taboos are broken. Madness is then another word for sensitivity, resistance, non-conformism.
In horror films, the motifs are closely related: the mad and the possessed show the same symptoms (screaming, talking mysterious things, becoming violent). Exorcism and therapy are attempts to correct a distorted psyche, or the struggle to recover the lost soul.
Tragically serious
The horror film «Smile» (director: Parker Finn), which is simple in terms of staging but very sophisticated in terms of narrative, takes up the idea of the visionary maniac and transfers the drama entirely to the psychiatric scene. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a doctor of psychology, takes care of the hard cases in the ER: drug addicts, psychotics, schizophrenics and so on. When a young patient explains that she is being stalked by maliciously smiling figures and then cuts her throat, it seems clear: a case of post-traumatic stress combined with violent impulses and delusions.
The alternative reading of the event, which the film heroine and the viewers alike have to expose themselves to: the suicide was attacked by evil, which spreads virally via said smile. The smile, actually the mimic expression of well-being and sympathy, becomes a sign that announces disaster, the warning sign is not on the wall but in the face of the other person.
Anyone who now thinks of grinning horror clowns (Stephen King’s Pennywise from “It”), nasty smiling killers (Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”) or immediately thinks of the Joker is right and wrong again. «Smile» uses the iconography of self-exhilarating madness, but gives it a tragic seriousness. The smiling suicides are agents of such a sinister disorder that one should call the exorcist.
But that is not available to an enlightened expert. You’re not an exorcist, you’re a psychotherapist. Or? “Smile” leaves a long time in limbo who tempts the innocent citizens to commit suicide. The psychiatrist researches the increasing number of cases, recognizes a pattern and ends up in a conspiracy in which she plays the leading role.
When the investigator, who is becoming more and more crazy himself, becomes his own subject, things get uncomfortable. How are you supposed to explore that brain with a sick brain? To put it another way: What does this psychologist experience on her ordeal? A trip to the hell of her own disorders – she is heavily burdened by her family history? Or is it a confrontation with demonic forces that have chosen the battered human psyche as their playground?
Could it be even more tricky? Isn’t there an assertion of freedom in the erroneous, i.e. amoral, “evil” dissolution of boundaries, the most crass expression of which would be suicide for no reason? In any case, the always accurate appearance of Rose looks like a hipster girl who once celebrated properly. She dumps her passive-aggressive manager friend. The ambitious sister is said to be bourgeois.
It’s about trauma
The direction swears the viewer into the perspective of the distanced, confident viewer. Lots of wide shots, views from a distance or, if up close, as if recorded with a surveillance camera: the film’s look is clinical, more documentary inspection than realistic cinematic illusion. This increases the ambivalence of what is happening right up to the drastic finale. That may not be revealed, just this much: trauma – and traumatization is what “Smile” is about – are the consequences of toxic exposure. If no detoxification takes place, innocent people join together to form a network of infected people. According to the idea, professional helpers are not immune to such networks or damage. Your expertise can fail on your doorstep (or behind it).
So is “Smile” a therapy-critical film? Coaches’ notorious recommendation to smile more often because it lifts your spirits has definitely become questionable after this film. The smiling contemporary can be a smiley face of mischief.