Unsettling and Insightful

Smile is an imperfect movie, but still a much better horror story than a lot of other, less thoughtful films in the genre.

SPOILERS BELOW

The grinning people are a wonderful way to be creepy and uncanny with a low effects budget. It's extremely effective. But once we get into the nature of the Entity attacking Rose, it becomes an even better film. Linking the monster to trauma was brilliant and the metaphor works on every level. It's inside your head, it messes with your sense of time and place, it messes with your perceptions of people, and - most importantly - as Rose's ex-and-would-be-therapist says, it never goes away; it can only be managed. That's key, for me, in why the movie really works and why Rose has such a hard time with the Entity.

Rose attempts to fight the Entity alone. Making her a therapist was kinda perfect here because Rose would think she could deal with this alone. She should never have done so. She should have started dealing with the underlying trauma (with her mother - her past is another great detail) over the symptom - and yes, I did almost feel like the monster was more symptom than problem.

Overall, the outcomes Rose achieves depend on her ability to seek help - she freezes out the therapist and gets one of the creepiest sequences in the film, she makes progress in her search once teaming up with her ex-boyfriend, etc.

My gripes are mostly minor quibbles.

There were a lot of jump scares. I could see them coming, and they were mostly just "Oh, it's right behind you." It wasn't their presence at all, but that the film sorta relied on them. When it didn't, it was better. The aforementioned therapist scene, for instance, or the scene where Rose is sleeping by herself and the Entity is looming in the hallway and Rose is just trying to pretend it isn't there (again, the metaphoric levels are great!)

I'm back-and-forth with the mental manipulation. It ties in so beautifully with the trauma metaphor, so I ultimately love it, but I would have liked more rules. When she thinks she's out of her old house, but winds up teleporting back, for instance. The problem with that is that I don't like when movies set up "anything goes" rules because then it's hard to know when the ending is "real".

A few times, scenes just "end". The therapist scene I keep referencing ends with the monster grabbing Rose, shoving its hand over her mouth, and then it cuts to her elsewhere. I did want to see an end to that. It's odd that they just jump away.

Finally, and I recognize that this is a lot of movies, but I still get frustrated with characters never using logic. When Rose realizes she is fighting a supernatural entity, how come she tries to fight it with an oil lamp? She doesn't talk to any shamans, priests, or medicine men. She doesn't go, "Okay, demons are real. Who knows how to fight demons?" She doesn't have a plan at all. I would have liked some notion of why she thought she could confront it and win.

Overall, a few overuses of jump-scares and a couple of logical inconsistencies (rarely a horror movie's strong point) aren't enough to derail it. Smile provides us with a chilling monster, a lot of great scares, and one of the tightest metaphors in its villain out of horror films I've seen recently.