Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Smile’ on Hulu, a Macabre Thriller Tackling Trauma and Mental Illness

Disturbo-thriller Smile (now streaming on Hulu) was the hands-down winner of Spooky Season ’22, raking in more than $100 at the domestic box office, and passing the $200 million mark globally. Not bad for a film from a first-time director (Parker Finn, who also wrote the screenplay), with a modest budget ($17 million) that was originally supposed to go direct-to-streaming (an occurrence that probably gives studio accountants fits) and was going up against a powerhouse horror franchise (Halloween Ends only earned $64 million, although it simultaneously debuted in theaters and on Peacock, hmm, thinky-guy emoji). Must be a great movie if it raked in so much dough, eh? Mmmmaybe. But it at least functions as a healthy introduction (for most of us, anyway) to Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, who plays a psychotherapist being stalked by a sinister grinning entity.

SMILE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Here’s a good, long look at a gross stain on a mattress. I think it’s from this woman’s mouth. Spilled pills, cigarette butts and empty bottles clutter her bedside. A little girl opens the door and gets a good long look at the mess. The girl was Rose and the woman was her mother and adult Rose (Bacon) awakens with a start. She was asleep at her desk. She puts in long hours as a therapist in the ER, helping people like her mother. Her supervisor (Kal Penn) tells her to go home, she’s been on the clock too long, and a second or two after she walks out of the office her phone rings. A fateful call, no doubt, because she could’ve said That’s Enough and sat down for a well-earned Solar Opposites binge, but no, she’s dedicated, and ends up in a room with a young woman who looks a little worse for wear. I’ll be blunt: she’s acting hysterical. Suddenly, a terrifying smile creeps across the woman’s face and she grabs a pottery shard and slices herself ear-to-ear and all Rose can do is watch.

Smile then establishes itself as one of those horror movies with a score that hits one staccato note that rings and rings and hangs in the air to create an eerie vibe as Rose heads home to her expensive ultramodern home – you know, the type that has all kinds of sharp angles and big windows and a fridge with wood-textured doors to match the cabinetry. She drinks a glass of wine a little too fast and sees the smiling girl in the shadows and drops the glass and it shatters and Rose’s fiance Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) walks in the door. Rough day, hon? Yup. They go to dinner Rose’s self-obsessed sister (Gillian Zinser) who yabbers on and on about all the banalities of her life as if other people are fascinated by that crap and then Rose and Trevor go home so she can arm the security system and feed the cat, two things that are just things you do before bed, and aren’t at all plot devices foreshadowing upcoming upsetting occurrences. And here I must pause to reveal that the cat’s name is Mustache, something I found irrationally upsetting. Don’t give your cats cutesy joke names, people. Cats should be named things like Zeke or Helen or Margaret. Thank you.

From here, Rose begins to exhibit many of the signs of mental illness she often sees in her patients. Delusions and hallucinations either creepy or violent (or both), and not just featuring the smiling woman, but other people afflicted with the sinister grin. The film establishes a couple more characters: A police cop who investigates the smiling girl’s suicide and who happens to be Rose’s ex, Joel (Kyle Gallner), who also isn’t at all another plot device who’s willing to violate all kinds of protocols should she need to investigate other bizarre suicides. And her own therapist, Dr. Northcott (Robin Weigert), who’s helped Rose work through her mommy issues, although I’m not sure how helpful she is, considering how Rose tells her about the gruesome hospital incident and Northcott’s chilly reply is “How did it make you feel?” IT MADE HER FEEL REALLY F—ED UP, DOC, HOW ELSE DO YOU THINK IT MADE HER FEEL. Time for a new therapist, Rose; maybe Jonah Hill could refer you to his. Anyway, Rose soldiers on through a series of alarming incidents that could be of a supernatural nature, or she could be in the throes of a lengthy psychotic episode, and we just can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t and whether this movie is exploring ideas about gaslighting and mental illness or just wants to creep us the hell out.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Without giving too much away, the pass-it-on/how-do-you-break-the-string plot is very much on an It Follows trip.

Performance Worth Watching: Sosie Bacon is quite good as a horror-thriller protagonist despite her character consisting of so much of the usual psychological baggage such protagonists carry around – but Weigert, forever immortal as the amazing Calamity Jane in Deadwood, steals the living crap out of a scene here that ends up being the movie’s most terrifying moment.

Memorable Dialogue: “Yeah, no, I’m fine!” – Rose keeps insisting she’s OK despite all this, and deploys the yeah-no thing that’s become a kind of confusing and contradictory modern-vernacular tic

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Smile walks the line between Story About Mental Illness That Really Makes You Think and exploiting awful real-life things like trauma and suicide for cheap scares. As for the former, I don’t think the film is necessarily that insightful, although subtextually, it’s often a plea for empathy for people with mental illness; Finn’s script addresses how many continue to stigmatize others by isolating them emotionally or casually tossing around derogatory terms like “headcase,” “nutcase” and “whole box of Froot Loops.” So hey, you, don’t do that.

As for the latter, Finn puts enough Psych-101 fodder into the story to keep it from being crass fear-profiteering. Rose has a walking, talking, smiling, stalking, appearing-out-of-nowhere metaphor on her heels, and it leads her to a location where she can walk… very… slowly… through a symbolico-synechdochal manifestation of her subconscious. Freud would be proud, although he’d also probably laugh and roll his eyes at the scene the cat foreshadowing leads us to. Finn is a strong visual director, tilting and pivoting the camera and using shadows, upsetting bits of body horror and distortion effects to generate some potent atmosphere. But he struggles in other ways, none more so than the film’s lack of expediency and pacing during a nearly two-hour run time – or his insistence that his Millennial protagonist would actually have a landline in her home.

Smile might’ve worked better and more efficiently if it more tightly focused on the core idea here: Despite her trauma and a rapidly piling-up series of disturbing events, Rose just puts on a happy face and soldiers on through her life, insisting she’s OK – and this character depiction is a sharp lance in the side of stigma. Finn tends to overcomplicate the idea, contriving creepy moments, and arriving at a conclusion that has us torn between wanting something more memorable and dramatic and appreciating its subtlety, at least relative to other mainstream horror films. Bottom line, at least the movie shows technical and thematic ambition, the work of a filmmaker just beginning to tap his potential.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Smile is ultimately satisfying, and shows enough efficacy as a jump-scare-laden psychological thriller to warrant a watch.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.