"Smile" follows a therapist who, after witnessing a patient die by suicide, starts to have the same experiences as that patient. She finds herself haunted by an entity that can take on the form of anyone, only giving itself away by its uncanny smile. In order to save herself from the same fate as her patient, she has to find out exactly what it is she's facing.
I didn't have high expectations for this film. It looked like a fairly standard horror movie, nothing I hadn't seen before. I had hoped, though, that it would at least be fun. Unfortunately, it was not.
This movie was largely undermined by its confused messaging. Over the course of watching it, it seemed clear to me that the "entity" was an analogy for trauma (and a pretty heavy-handed one, at that). This made the ending extremely unsatisfying. Just when the main character thinks she has defeated the entity, by finally facing her childhood trauma, it turns out it was all a trick and she has, in fact, failed. And then she is forced by the entity to kill herself. While I doubt this was the intended meaning, what I took away from that was that you cannot break cycles of trauma, and that it will ultimately destroy you.
Now, I am by no means opposed to nihilistic films. "Martyrs" and "Eden Lake" are some of my favorite movies. But in a movie that felt so much like a morality tale about overcoming trauma and mental illness, it seems very out of place to have an ending like this. In my opinion, they either needed to ease off the trauma allegory, or commit to it and handle it with more care.
Overall, a pretty mediocre movie that was only made worse by trying to be about something deeper, which it didn't really know how to handle.
- Monty