 When it comes to the horror genre, nothing does a better job at giving me the heebie-jeebies quite like the psychological category. If you truly wanna get a scare out of me, you've gotta make me ask "WTF?" I have such admiration for a film that can do something like that other than just show me a bunch of gore, or a bunch of ghosts or demons. I love horror movies as a whole, but psychological horror is a whole other level. I think 'Smile' is one of the best examples of such a movie I've seen in a long time.
The story here centres cleverly on a therapist named Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) who, one day, meets with an extremely distressed girl named Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey). Laura claims that some sort of evil entity has been haunting her ever since she witnessed one of her professors commit suicide in front of her. This entity shows itself as various different people who present her with a ghastly smile, haunting her, and foretelling her death. After a traumatic experience at the hospital, Rose soon finds herself caught up in what seems like it could be a similar situation. Beginning with one of Rose's patients, Carl (Jack Sochet) presenting her with his own ghastly smile and foretelling of her death, Rose slowly starts to lose her grip on reality. After the aforementioned traumatic experience with this smiling Carl fellow on top of it, her supervisor, Dr. Morgan Desai (Kal Penn) orders her to take a week off for a breather, concerned she may be overworking and not getting enough sleep. She does, after all, have to take care of mentally unhealthy people, so needs a good head on her shoulders for it. However, during her time off, Rose's hallucinations continue, and even sometimes come through to reality in some pretty nasty ways, causing Rose to question her own reality. Like a responsible therapist, she seeks some help from her own therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott (Robin Weigert) who chalks it up to the tragic death of her mother (Dora Kiss) and the guilt she may be feeling because of it. But there's something about this entity that's haunting and terrorizing her that's a bit more real than that. This entity is a nightmare fuel concept that follows Rose around, presenting itself as people she knows and trusts, and constantly telling her how her "time is almost up." What makes this all the more terrifying is the idea of Rose's role as a therapist, which really turns the genre on its head, asking basically "what if the helper becomes helpless?" The more it pops into reality, the more it does things to frame Rose; a woman who knows about mental health and how to treat it. This thing alienates her from loved ones who simply think she's gone off her nut. I will admit that there's this common theme within horror about things being symbolic of grief, loss, regret and the like, and this isn't much of an exception. But what I truly did appreciate about this was putting a medical professional in that role in which no one believes her, and everyone seems to think she's gone crazy. Somehow it makes things scarier. But on top of that, there are moments in this movie, especially towards one hell of a climax, where things go way outside of the box, completely catching me off guard, but in a really good way. The ideas and concepts behind this movie are pretty terrifying, and for me, are solidified with that concept of "what if your therapist needed therapy?" but digs even deeper with the idea that she knows this is some kind of curse. It harkens back to old horror movies in which authority figures just plain won't listen to you. I really loved how this was executed, being mostly a psychological horror that got into my head, and morphing in about its last half hour or so into something that will totally catch you off-guard. It's one of the best all-around horror movies I've seen in quite some time. 4/5
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