![]() ![]() Part of the complexity of Smile is that while audiences are mostly seeing Rose’s point of view, and have little doubt that the creature assaulting her is real, it’s also possible to see why her sister, fiancé, and therapist would find her behavior frightening and even infuriating. “I think it’s a universal theme for everyone, this idea that we’re all afraid of not being believed, especially by the people closest to us. “I wanted to do something that felt like what it would be like to be to experience, to put yourself in someone’s shoes and maybe look at in a way we haven’t considered before,” Finn says. And when Rose starts trying to get help in dealing with the monster, her sister and fiancé dismiss her in the same ways. As a therapist, she’s already used to seeing people dismiss her suffering patients as “crazy,” to the point of writing off their deaths as unimportant. Smile’s protagonist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), deals with deep traumas, from unresolved childhood guilt and fear around her mother’s death to the fact that she’s being haunted by an invisible entity that can make her see horrifying things. “We all put these masks on to hide our trauma, which was very much a motif in the film, with the smile being a metaphor, a mask,” he says. The ways people have traditionally avoided dealing with or discussing some of those traumas is part of the movie’s central image: the horrible fake smile that’s a sign of something deeply unpleasant going on. “The idea that trauma could beget trauma was really present in my brain, and I think it just crept its way into the script.” “I developed and wrote and ended up shooting this movie all during the pandemic, when I think we were all traumatized and feeling a sense of isolation and a fear of transmission,” he says. For me, that’s one of my greatest fears.”įinn suggests that due to events around the COVID-19 quarantines, feelings of stress and anxiety have become their own parallel epidemic. And I wanted to use that, and also explore what it might be like to have your mind turning against you. “Everybody walks around carrying these things inside of themselves that are deeply rooted in them at their core, that are based on their histories and traumas. “I think it’s so relatable,” writer-director Parker Finn told Polygon at Fantastic Fest, where the movie first premiered. But it’s also in large part about what it’s like to carry the weight of anxiety, trauma, or other mental pain, and about how difficult it can be to convey that weight to other people. Smile is frightening in some pretty standard creature-feature ways, with a ton of jump-scares and disturbing imagery designed to give people nightmares. ![]() Audiences may relate to the deeply creepy horror movie Smile differently based on whether they’ve had any experience with navigating mental illness, in themselves or in someone close to them. ![]()
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