What makes us afraid? This is the question that Smile, created by Parker Finn, is done several times and from different angles. But in particular, this is a problem that the film does not only address from a sensory point of view. For the director, ominous and gloomy has many faces, and it is this small but important nuance that maintains tension.
At the same time, this is what gives it, perhaps, a strange ambiguity. The film is an exploration of a supernatural event involving a series of mysterious deaths..
The combination of suspense and horror is brilliant enough to move from one side to the other of what seems to be a broad story. What haunts psychiatrist Rose Kotter (Sozie Bacon) and seems to be everywhere?
A strange look into the darkness inside
More troubling, is it true or a twisted mind game? Most of the first half hour Smile arranges parts of your plot to tell a complex idea. What is hidden in what scares us? Trauma, the possibility that our mind is able to deceive us in a cruel and irresistible way?
Finn doesn’t immediately answer questions, and the film moves through the difficult terrain of the unknown. Gradually, the tension within the plot develops into a chilling sense of disorientation.
He does so with extraordinary precision, turning Rose’s search for answers into a rare glimpse of inner darkness. After a patient committed suicide in his office in an out of control situation, the psychiatrist needs to understand what happened. At the very least, immerse yourself in the phenomenon that seems to surround not only the horrific series of murders, but each of his victims before they die.
Smilea set of chilling smiles
Rose suggests that what drove her patient to commit suicide was psychiatric in nature. At its worst, a type of disorder that he shares with many other similar cases. You know well that such an event is almost never accidental.. Her mother committed suicide when she was young, and the event haunts her like a psychological spectrum to contend with. So trying to understand what happened in your office – and in front of you – is perhaps a good way to redeem your fears.
But as Rose navigates a unique route of ever darker and more confusing trails, surrounded by smiling faces. Static, icy smiles that only she can see. The slip of the tongue of an unreliable narrator turns the film into a strange insight into reality. Is the psychiatrist experiencing the same inexplicable situation as her patient? Could it be the memory of his mother’s death? Rose looks at the tense smiling faces and refuses to believe in the possibility of something supernatural.
The horror of the invisible and silent in Smile
However, the evil around him – and it’s brilliant how the movie comes to a close – is unstoppable and ruthless. So brutal that the deaths that occur one after the other leave an obvious trace of the only way. Rose must look into what she dare not look at.. That almost involuntarily connects her with the deceased patient and with many other victims who preceded her. Perhaps very soon she herself will become a victim.
Just like Ring Gore Verbinski, whom he resembles in tone and narrative density, Smile tells the curse The one who perpetuates himself becomes stronger and more cruel, because he receives strength from death. This may seem like a common horror movie premise, but Finn finds a way to connect the idea to something more elemental. Perception of loss and suffering as an elemental engine of something sinister, nameless and always lurking.
When terror is a mirror
Finn is toying with the possibility that the reality shown in the film is not entirely accurate. There is a feeling of delirium, and it passes from stage to stage. Meanwhile, Rose tries to find a way to defy the invisible doom that haunts her. Like all arguments involving a sentence that must be stopped in order to discover its origin, Smile It depends on the urgency of the answers. This is how you give your character time and resources to investigate.
But at the same time, he does not forget that the question is not really what is causing the increasingly grotesque and gruesome murders. The big question from the first scene is: how much can we trust Rose’s version of what surrounds her? That’s when the scenario spreads. The protagonist must deal with the danger that lies in wait for her and, in particular, find a possible answer. But when it does, it’s just a layer of the real nature of horror.
Smile he plays with all sorts of possibilities and allows the viewer to trace the transition into darkness. The curse—or what Rose discovered almost by accident—waits in the shadows. Even worse, it’s an alternative that could also lead her to discover completely forgotten parts of herself. “What’s in there?” the character asks. But not to a dark staircase, a gloomy basement or a desert landscape. He asks the mirror, his own reflection. To the smile that – perhaps – begins to form on his face.
With amazing skill Smile he manages to keep his secrets long enough to cause real fear. A cautionary note that the film builds on by creating an unbearable and increasingly gritty atmosphere. A major achievement at a time when horror films have become an inevitable mixture of trite platitudes.
