Smile for a Second

Leave a comment

I’d read that Smile 2 was better than the first Smile.  But there was a gap of about a year between seeing the sequel and I might’ve forgotten some details about how this was supposed to work.  The “smile” entity possesses someone when they see the previously possessed person die by suicide.  Okay, we’re back where we started.  The movie makes a fairly heavy use of hallucinations, so it’s difficult to know how far to “rewind” to get back to what “really” happened.  So let’s start at the beginning.  Skye Riley is a pop artist who’s trying to stage a comeback tour after a bad stint with drug abuse that led to the death of her boyfriend in a car crash.  Since Skye was in the car, she sustained several injuries but she’s healed up and ready to perform again.

The problem is that she’s still in pain.  A high school friend, who unfortunately is possessed by the smile entity, deals in drugs so she tries to get some Vicodin from him.  She witnesses his death by suicide and becomes infected.  From that point on the hallucinations start.  We learn that the possessing entity drives the victim, or host, insane within a week.  Skye meets a nurse who offers to help her by stopping her heart, thus killing the entity, and then reviving her at the last moment.  She naturally thinks him insane.  Meanwhile the hallucinations continue and the viewer doesn’t know what is “real” and what is not.  After reconciling with her best friend, and killing her mother, Skye decides she has to take the nurse’s offer.  She’s tricked by hallucinations into not having the procedure done and (somewhat predictably) dies by suicide in front of a huge audience, thereby infecting them all.

The film was praised for its acting, and no doubt, it is good.  The premise is scary enough, but somehow it just didn’t convince me.  Perhaps it was a little too slick.  A little too self aware of the previous film.  The explanation for the entity is that it’s some kind of demon or spirit, but when the movie ends up showing its “true form” it doesn’t seem as scary as all that.  Maybe because it’s smiling.  I’m glad that the critics found it good.  Horror does deserve more positive press than it tends to get.  The creepy smile is effective, but the movie itself, while introducing religion, in the form of a demon, felt like more of the same.

For the Camera

Leave a comment

Smile 2 is getting some good critical notice and I hadn’t seen Smile (1) yet.  Psychological horror often bothers me, but I figured I’d grin and bear it.  I’m glad I did.  The ideas in the film, which participates in “the stigma trope,” are disturbing because it’s unclear if Rose (the protagonist) is mentally ill or not.  The stigma trope posits that something has infected someone either by having seen something they shouldn’t (as in Ringu) or by physical contagion (It Follows) and the victim can’t shake it.  Smile may trigger viewers with suicidal phobias since the premise is that an entity feeding on trauma passes from person to person by having the new victim witness the previous victim’s suicide.  Rose is a therapist who hasn’t gotten over the trauma of her mother’s death.  Rose witnesses a patient die by suicide, and who smiles just before she does it.

The patient told Rose that she’d watched one of her professors die by suicide.  Rose subsequently learns that the professor also witnessed a suicide and so on and so on.  Each prior victim had watched someone else die.  Now Rose has to figure out how to break the cycle, otherwise she’ll perpetuate it.  The idea of inadvertently obtaining a “sticky” entity is pretty scary, and a very human concern.  One of the more frightening aspects of possession movies is the belief that now that demons know that you know, they will target you.  Interestingly, what makes this film provocative is that the victim has to have suffered trauma before.  As such, it is a study of trauma and its lasting effects.  I suspect most people don’t intentionally traumatize others (world leaders excepted).  Trauma can be dealt with (or not) in very different ways.

Smile did quite well at the box office.  I suspect there are a lot of us traumatized people around.  Capitalism encourages traumatizing others through slow violence, if not the more obvious quick way.  People don’t easily walk away from events that scarred them, particularly if they happened at an early age.  Such people, if experience is anything to go by, find themselves in vulnerable positions in life and rather thoughtless people, often for religious reasons, end up traumatizing them even further.  I have to admit that there were triggers for me in Smile.  I still struggle with a few of my own traumas that were never resolved.  Like Rose, I sometimes don’t know who can really be trusted with such things.  This is a perceptive movie.  I guess now I can put on a happy face and see Smile 2.  But first I’d better talk to my therapist.