Smile (2022 Movie)
I watched this horror movie based on its deeply creepy trailer. It is, indeed, sometimes very scary. Unfortunately, that's the only thing it does well. Smile is wrong about human behavior, it's wrong about police procedure, it's wrong about hospitals, and it's incredibly wrong about mental health care, which is unfortunate as its protagonist is a psychiatrist. Probably. One of the many things this movie doesn't know is the difference between a psychiatrist and a therapist.
Smile is basically three or four great scares and 50 pounds of WTF in a trenchcoat.
Dr. Rose Cotter is a doctor working in the psych ward of a large hospital. A young woman is brought in, apparently traumatized after witnessing a bizarre suicide. Rose interviews her in what seems to be their standard interview room. It's huge and empty, with two chairs in the middle like the cubicles in Severance, plus a convenient china vase in case some suicidal or homicidal person would like to break it and obtain a sharp object.
After saying that she sees creepy smiling people everywhere, the woman breaks the vase, smiles creepily, and cuts her own throat. There is a bright red emergency phone, but it's on a wall in a room the size of a warehouse, so Rose is unable to get from the chair to the wall in time to get help.
This is not the only ginormous empty room with two people huddled in the middle in this movie. Another one turns up later in a prison, of all random places. I have no idea why the director thought this was a thing.
Rose gets interviewed by a douchey-looking cop whom I will call Douchecop, who turns out to be her ex-boyfriend. She then has an encounter with another mental patient, who yells at her and freaks her out. She shouts, "I need a 5150!"
A 5150 is an involuntary detainment in a mental hospital. The guy she wants it for is already a live-in patient at a mental hospital. So she's basically saying, "Put him where he is some more!"
Kal Penn as Dr. Desai, her supervisor and the only person in the movie who 1) can act, 2) reacts like a human being, puts her on leave. Rose goes home to her fiance who can't act and to her cat. At this point![[personal profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1491408111i/22407843.png)
scioscribe
, who was watching this with me, confirmed that the cat dies and how its body is found - this will be relevant later. (I only realize now, while writing this, that having seen the entire movie, I have no idea who killed the cat.)
Rose then starts having spooky smile encounters. One of these is an absolutely brilliant scary scene involving a call to home security. Like I said, the scares are mostly good to excellent. It's everything else that's the problem.
Rose goes to her own psychiatrist, where a scene ensues which gets like sixteen things wrong about therapy, trauma reactions, medication, etc in ten minutes.
Her psychiatrist condescendingly chides Rose for diagnosing herself and requesting medication for what she thinks are post-traumatic hallucinations, saying, "I don't think this is about the woman who killed herself in front of you. You only knew her for about ten minutes. I think this is really about your mother's suicide."
WHEN SOMEONE SLASHES THEIR THROAT IN FRONT OF YOU, IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW LONG YOU KNEW THEM.
The psychiatrist then says she can't be hallucinating because she's clearly not psychotic (PTSD-based hallucinations are not the same as psychosis, and people who have any kind of hallucination can seem perfectly fine at other times) and refuses to give her meds. GIVE THIS POOR WOMAN SOME XANAX.
I forgot to mention that basically everyone but Kal Penn is randomly mean. Douchecop is randomly mean, not in a scary cop way but in a petty whiny way. Rose's sister and her husband are randomly dicks to her. I would call this a theme, but this movie doesn't have themes, so it's more of a pattern with no apparent reason.
Things get even more batshit from here on out. Cut for spoilers and the only dead cat scene I've ever enjoyed, because it's accidentally hilarious.
( Read more... )
Of all genres, horror is perhaps the best at constructing a story around a single powerful image or concept that represents its central theme: the Tethered in Us, the biological blending of the Shimmer in Annihilation, the sexually transmitted curse in It Follows. All of those concepts also represent the themee of the movies. The image Smile is built around, the smile, has nothing to do with trauma or anything else.
The credits have three completely random music/sound cues play over them: first "Lollipop," then a song I forget, then screeching and mumbling that I assume was Douchecop's soft metalcore band. (You just know he had one.)
Smile a movie made by someone with a real skill for being scary, which is not easy, and apparently no experience whatsoever with human beings or their institutions. Smile is about 1% brilliant, 9% very good, 90% terrible, and 100% batshit. I have never laughed so hard at a dead cat.
In conclusion, "Mental illness is hereditary! I looked it up!"
https://amzn.to/3FQiCO3
[image error] [image error]
comments
Smile is basically three or four great scares and 50 pounds of WTF in a trenchcoat.
Dr. Rose Cotter is a doctor working in the psych ward of a large hospital. A young woman is brought in, apparently traumatized after witnessing a bizarre suicide. Rose interviews her in what seems to be their standard interview room. It's huge and empty, with two chairs in the middle like the cubicles in Severance, plus a convenient china vase in case some suicidal or homicidal person would like to break it and obtain a sharp object.
After saying that she sees creepy smiling people everywhere, the woman breaks the vase, smiles creepily, and cuts her own throat. There is a bright red emergency phone, but it's on a wall in a room the size of a warehouse, so Rose is unable to get from the chair to the wall in time to get help.
This is not the only ginormous empty room with two people huddled in the middle in this movie. Another one turns up later in a prison, of all random places. I have no idea why the director thought this was a thing.
Rose gets interviewed by a douchey-looking cop whom I will call Douchecop, who turns out to be her ex-boyfriend. She then has an encounter with another mental patient, who yells at her and freaks her out. She shouts, "I need a 5150!"
A 5150 is an involuntary detainment in a mental hospital. The guy she wants it for is already a live-in patient at a mental hospital. So she's basically saying, "Put him where he is some more!"
Kal Penn as Dr. Desai, her supervisor and the only person in the movie who 1) can act, 2) reacts like a human being, puts her on leave. Rose goes home to her fiance who can't act and to her cat. At this point
scioscribe
, who was watching this with me, confirmed that the cat dies and how its body is found - this will be relevant later. (I only realize now, while writing this, that having seen the entire movie, I have no idea who killed the cat.)Rose then starts having spooky smile encounters. One of these is an absolutely brilliant scary scene involving a call to home security. Like I said, the scares are mostly good to excellent. It's everything else that's the problem.
Rose goes to her own psychiatrist, where a scene ensues which gets like sixteen things wrong about therapy, trauma reactions, medication, etc in ten minutes.
Her psychiatrist condescendingly chides Rose for diagnosing herself and requesting medication for what she thinks are post-traumatic hallucinations, saying, "I don't think this is about the woman who killed herself in front of you. You only knew her for about ten minutes. I think this is really about your mother's suicide."
WHEN SOMEONE SLASHES THEIR THROAT IN FRONT OF YOU, IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW LONG YOU KNEW THEM.
The psychiatrist then says she can't be hallucinating because she's clearly not psychotic (PTSD-based hallucinations are not the same as psychosis, and people who have any kind of hallucination can seem perfectly fine at other times) and refuses to give her meds. GIVE THIS POOR WOMAN SOME XANAX.
I forgot to mention that basically everyone but Kal Penn is randomly mean. Douchecop is randomly mean, not in a scary cop way but in a petty whiny way. Rose's sister and her husband are randomly dicks to her. I would call this a theme, but this movie doesn't have themes, so it's more of a pattern with no apparent reason.
Things get even more batshit from here on out. Cut for spoilers and the only dead cat scene I've ever enjoyed, because it's accidentally hilarious.
( Read more... )
Of all genres, horror is perhaps the best at constructing a story around a single powerful image or concept that represents its central theme: the Tethered in Us, the biological blending of the Shimmer in Annihilation, the sexually transmitted curse in It Follows. All of those concepts also represent the themee of the movies. The image Smile is built around, the smile, has nothing to do with trauma or anything else.
The credits have three completely random music/sound cues play over them: first "Lollipop," then a song I forget, then screeching and mumbling that I assume was Douchecop's soft metalcore band. (You just know he had one.)
Smile a movie made by someone with a real skill for being scary, which is not easy, and apparently no experience whatsoever with human beings or their institutions. Smile is about 1% brilliant, 9% very good, 90% terrible, and 100% batshit. I have never laughed so hard at a dead cat.
In conclusion, "Mental illness is hereditary! I looked it up!"
https://amzn.to/3FQiCO3
[image error] [image error]
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