I Hate-Watched Smile!

I don’t hate-watch much these days. It’s most fun as a group sport, and I’m at a low ebb socially (but cuffing season’s here, ladies! Need a tall cuddly guy who owns several blankets, can be seduced into watching anything and doesn’t judge your delivery order? I have references). I’m historically not above live-tweeting a garbage movie at 10pm to get a heart or three, but - as I’m making a real go of productivity on this blog, that feels awfully like “giving it away.” Giving it away to Elon Musk, too. Ew. So movies that actively piss me off tend to be turned off, or fast forwarded to important moments in the Wikipedia plot description. Maybe I want to see how a character bites it. But I take the ethics of movie criticism very seriously, and I won’t write about a movie I didn’t see all the way through. Maybe just Insta-story a ridiculous face Kevin James made.

Even if I do hate-watch a movie all the way through, that doesn’t mean I’ll write about it. I watched Halloween Ends a while back, but can’t bring myself to make a coherent, thorough case about why it’s such an embarrassing, ridiculous finale to an embarrassing, ridiculous trilogy. I’d have to fire it up again to accurately quote the purple nonsense Laurie blathered into her memoir. I might even be compelled to revisit the previous two entries, and see if I’m correct that the locals in those weren’t wielding cartoon east coast “I live by the ha-ba” accents. Or maybe I'd want to rewatch every Halloween movie so I can be sure which ones are the worst. I don’t recall hating the one from the Scream writer as a young man, and people sure rep for the Rob Zombie one with the pony these days (maybe it’s better if you’re not seeing it bored with a pal at 1pm on a weekday).

Problem is, nobody’s paying me to give a fresh, clinical assessment of an endlessly reborn franchise where no one seems willing to imitate the merciless minimalism of the first movie, instead trying to go deep into character or metaphor and all the shit that John Carpenter didn't bother with. Halloween was a hit because it was nothing but relatively elegant POV shots, creepy music, teens getting dispassionately got, and Donald Pleasance shitting his pants over this utterly evil kid turned utterly evil man who he probably shouldn’t have taught how to drive a car. Carpenter perfected the slasher, intentionally sacrificing plausibility for one last scream from the audience. All the directors since have tried to dignify the concept, rather than exploit it for similarly heartless chills and thrills, mistakenly thinking this makes them profound instead of sophomoric. You have to be a real ding-dong to watch the first movie and earnestly respond “I’ll always wonder what became of that supporting character, whose last name I’ll carry with me all my life. Oh, Haddonfield or whatever it's called, how your collective trow-ma weighs on me!” At least, twenty years ago, post-Scream, the idea of Jamie Lee Curtis going back to the mill with improved thespian skills was novel! At least I hadn’t already seen her dismember her bete noire with dubious finality! I could go on all day, but ehhhh. It’s not like anyone’s really patting the four-man team that wrote Halloween Ends (or at least dictated it to an assistant between vape hits) on the back anyway.

I did hear some positivity for the surprise hit Smile though, so that feels a little more worthy of a pro bono bubble burst. From the trailer alone I surmised this was a cheap attempt to emulate the novelties of modern art-house horror, particularly the dread-heavy dioramas, prolonged pauses and upside-down aerial shots associated with Ari Aster’s films. But the movie’s nine figure gross had me wondering if it was at least an effective steez jack, maybe redeemed by a good performance or a steady directorial hand. I was especially intrigued when I learned it was meant to go straight to streaming before test audiences suggested mass appeal. The band Bush had some good riffs even if they weren’t authentic grunge, y’know.

But not all commercial grunge, or sleeper horror, is equal. Halfway into Smile, it felt like the Stone Temple Pilots of modern horror. Early Stone Temple Pilots. “Plush.” Yeah, yeah, they filmed the drive upside down. An actor slowly turns their head in the dark to see something spooky smiling at them. But the mis-en-scene is so blah! Dogme 95 movies looked more considered. The actors, either pros (Kal Penn! A-Train from The Boys!) or the children of pros (yes, Sosie Bacon was born but a degree from Kevin!), look like they're getting no help from the script or from behind the camera. The plot is transparently The Ring and almost nothing more. I believed writer/director Parker Finn put some time into learning the latest, hippest tricks in the genre, but that’s fucking it.  Put the guitar through the right kind of effects, dyed the hair, emulated the latest vocal affects and voila: a well-tailored photocopy fortuitous and shameless enough to take advantage of an industry need for cool product (Pearl Jam didn’t want to make videos, Ari Aster’s taken his time plotting an epic third film). It wasn't long before I was ready to tap out, except I was curious how the victim of this latest curse could hope to escape it.

That reveal - and for once I won’t really spoil it - truly took things to hate-watch territory. This was no longer the “Plush” of modern horror. This was the Silverchair’s “Tomorrow” of modern horror. Smile no longer came off like pros indulging the latest fashion. It felt like teenagers aspiring to mature themes they couldn’t grasp. This wasn’t cliche poetry about real pain, this was hollering at the top of your lungs about how it’s hard to drink from a tap with no sink. And doing it because the cool grown-ups holler these days. This isn’t to suggest that Finn or Daniel Johns of Silverchair hadn’t experienced real pain, but to say that their surprise debut smash works mostly as an overwraught genre exercise that's deep only if you miss the absurd naivete behind the precocious professionalism.

In a sense, Smile does what I prescribed for Halloween sequels, sacrificing coherency and metaphorical poignancy for newly formulaic chills and thrills. But the movie doesn’t just take the trademarks of modern arthouse horror and apply it to the generic curse-thriller template. It also takes on the subject matter. That subject matter - psychological trauma & psychotic breakdowns - demands you either find metaphorical poignancy or stop acting like you did. At least if you don’t want your four million sold eventually showing up in the used bin, roasted forever by nerds who take this shit seriously enough to bother hate-watching.