SPOILER ALERT!: Smile
Convenience is killing the entertainment experience.
Today I went to the theater to see “Smile,” after mixed reviews and a few messages telling me not to waste my time. I have to say, I love actually being in the theater and getting the whole experience from buying overpriced snacks (or sneaking them in), hearing everyone’s genuine reactions, and watching the movie as the director meant for it to be seen (even if there was a man full on snoring — I hope he got the rest he needed).
People are so quick to give a review of art, whether that be music and people on twitter barely listening and enjoying music in hopes of getting a viral tweet off of how “terrible” a new song or album is (only for months later for them to tell us we “slept” on the same album they were bashing) or binge watching television shows to and instantly spoiling them for the whole timeline.
It seems that as far as we’ve come as a society, maybe the old way of doing things was the better way after all. (Personally, I say we bring back bartering!)
Smile starts off with a woman dead in her bed as a child, her daughter Rose, watches her. Rose is a doctor in a psychiatric hospital and she has a patient, a PhD student, come in who watched her professor bludgeon himself to death with a hammer in front of her. During their session an “entity” takes over her patient and with a smile right in front of Rose, she slices her neck from ear to ear.
After that the entity begins to take on the voice and face of people around Rose, with the same sinister smile. Her fiancé, sister and brother in law believe her to be crazy. Not only did she witness the murder right in front of her but the people she cared about most didn’t really care about it as they just wrote her off as going crazy like her mother. When it comes to mental illness and how people deal with traumatic experiences, I feel the real horror is feeling unseen and unheard. They wanted her to go back to “normal,” back to her perfect life but after experiencing something like that, there really is no going back, only starting from a new beginning.
One scene the sticks out to me is a few days after the incident, Rose goes to her nephews party. The day before we watch her buy him a toy train but when he unwraps his gifts in front of everyone, in the box is her dead cat (RIP Mustache). Rose’s sister Holly points how much that traumatized her son later in the movie and he sees his aunt losing control in the car, further scaring him. Will he end up just like his aunt? Who knows (probably so…)
Eventually we find out the professor who killed himself watched a woman kill herself in front of him, and that woman has seen a man kill himself in front of her and on and on. The cycle continues, and not only locally, but a man who survived the entity by killing someone else tells us he heard of news stories of the same thing happening in Brazil.
It’s possible I’m looking too far into it (or maybe I got the message just right) but I think the movie is about how trauma is passed down and it’s not only through genetics. Was Rose always destined to be “crazy” because of her mothers death and her patient killing herself was the trigger that pushed her over the edge?
Trauma doesn’t care who you are, what your occupation is, or how “good” of a person you are. You truly never know who has been through what, people could walk around with a smile everyday of their lives and not be here tomorrow, that’s the sad truth of life and what I felt the movie was trying to portray.
I encourage you to go out and see the movie for yourself so you can make your own opinion but if you’re looking for a real scary movie — you won’t find it here. It was actually quite sad.
