Smile’s treatment of mental illness is messy on purpose, says director

The deeply disturbing horror film may appeal to some viewers. Smile differently based on whether they’ve had any experience with navigating mental illness, in themselves or in someone close to them. Smile It is scary in a variety of standard creature-features, and includes a lot of jump scares and disturbing imagery that will give you nightmares. 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.

“I think it’s so relatable,” writer-director Parker Finn told Polygon at Fantastic Fest, where the movie first premiered. “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. This is what I was trying to do. For me, that’s one of my greatest fears.”

Finn believes that anxiety and stress have been a parallel epidemic to the COVID-19 events. “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. “The idea that trauma could beget trauma was really present in my brain, and I think it just crept its way into the script.”

Image by Paramount Pictures

Finn believes that these emotions are more common now than ever before and may therefore be easier to talk about. “I think it’s something that as a society, we’ve all started to confront more. I think it’s in the air,” Finn says. “It’s something we’re all aware of: Everybody’s got trauma of some sort in their life, whether it’s great or small, things they carry around with them that they don’t talk about.”

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. “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.

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. 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. And when Rose starts trying to get help in dealing with the monster, her sister and fiancé dismiss her in the same ways.

“I wanted to do something that felt like what it would be like to be to experience [a breakdown], to put yourself in someone’s shoes and maybe look at [other people’s experiences and traumas] in a way we haven’t considered before,” Finn says. “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. That’s terrifying.”

Image by Paramount Pictures

Finn wanted Rose’s behavior and her response to the events of Smile to try to keep the story as realistic as possible to counter the fantasy elements. So he consulted with psychologists on developing her character, and “had one read the script and weigh in.”

One of the complexities 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. Finn wanted viewers to feel a little torn between perspectives, but he was confident they’d come down on Rose’s side.

“I think it’s always a balance, but I wanted to trust the audience and respect their intelligence and their emotions,” he says. “And I love messy movies. People should feel differently. You might even want to incite them. You want your audience to have a lot of empathy and sympathy, while sometimes you need them to feel some compassion. That’s when a movie is doing its job, right?”

Finn calls Smile “my attempt to add to the conversation” about mental illness and people experiencing internal crisis in ways that might be difficult for outsiders to understand or relate to.

“I think as a society, we’ve started to speak better about mental health and therapy and trauma, things like that. But we’re still not really there. It’s not something people understand. So I wanted to use this as a parallel and a device to explore something that hopefully would get people to think a little differently about what it might be like to be actually experiencing those sorts of things.”