Debapriya Bhattacharya
The supernatural horror film ‘Smile’ marks the debut of Parker Finn as a feature film director. The 2022 psychological drama follows Rose Cutter, a New Jersey based therapist who becomes traumatized after witnessing her patient slit their own throat. Her waking hours are marred with visions of harrowing deaths, leading her to believe that she is cursed by an entity that seeks to end her life. The entity in question appears as the everyday people in her life and is identified by Rose with the help of its characteristic soulless smile. Unresolved trauma underlies the supernatural theme of the film, grounding the narrative in mystical realism.
Smile is a Fictional Film That Follows an Original Short
The narrative of ‘Smile’ is not based on actual events and is the product of director Parker Finn’s creative imagination. Interestingly, it is a continuation of his 2020 short film, ‘Laura Hasn’t Slept’, that marks the first appearance of the Entity, who apparently traumatizes individuals to take their own lives by forcing ghastly nightmares upon them. The short follows Laura Weaver, who consults her therapist after having recurring nightmares. She sees the facade of various people wearing a sinister smile, and becomes scared to fall asleep. Laura’s story concludes in the opening scenes of ‘Smile,’ where she confronts Rose Cutter and passes on the curse of the Entity to her.
Parker Finn Found Inspiration in Several Genre Classics
‘Smile’ taps into the horror of a supernatural entity driving people to embrace their own macabre deaths by appearing in their nightmares or hallucinations in the guise of known faces. While franchise creator Parker Finn has not acknowledged any real-life origin for his work of fiction, he has touched upon elements that have seemingly inspired the conception in an interview with SyFy. Finn believes “we’re all the product of our inspirations,” and he took his own for creating ‘Smile’ from stories featuring a chain of cursed individuals. “I wanted to make a love letter to the cursed chain story, which is something that I’ve always loved and been fascinated with,” he said. “But what I really wanted to do was place a character inside one of those movies that was very grounded, honest, and felt real, and was dealing with a lot of internal stuff that was initially separate from this external element that comes in.”
A fan of Japanese horror films, Finn admitted that films such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 classic ‘Cure’ and Hideo Nakata’s 1998 horror film ‘Ringu’ influenced his work. Other movies that had an impact on the making of ‘Smile’ include Todd Haynes’ 1995 movie ‘Safe’, which dives deep into a character’s anxiety and prevents the audience from figuring out what is real and what is being imagined by the person on screen. Roman Polanski’s 1968 film ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ also caught Finn’s attention, especially Mia Farrow’s titular character, who gets gaslighted to mistrust her own senses. A parallel can be arguably drawn between this phenomenon and Rose Cutter in ‘Smile’ being distrusted by her friends as well as her husband not being able to figure out if she is hallucinating.
Smile Explores Anxiety Embedded Within Individuals
Parker Finn has noted in interviews that he looked inward to seek the horror that he wanted to portray on camera in his film ‘Smile’. He believes that an individual’s greatest fear is losing their sense of self and trust in their faculties. It turns worse if that feeling is shared by the people closest to them. And following the absolute loss of trust, the nagging fear of being targeted by an unknown entity is mind-shattering, according to the director. “That feeling, I think, there’s so much anxiety in that. I was writing this movie during the pandemic, and some of that slipped in there, maybe subconsciously,” he said. Whatever he felt, Finn told Starburst Magazine that he wanted to incorporate all of them and create a film that could be described as “a constantly escalating nightmare.”
From the outset, Finn wanted the story to have the worst possible end for the protagonist. He told SyFy that he wished for the audience to reach an emotional catharsis with Rose Cutter, only for the evil entity to rise up again and sweep the floor from underneath her. The intended message is that sometimes doing all the right things is not enough to sway the inevitable. Thus, ‘Smile’ attempts to deliver on a horror that is well-infused within well-rounded characters.
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