Types of Horror V : Losing your mind in Smile and Smile 2

 

Losing your grip on reality is a fear that I believe always exists on the back of one’s head in the everyday life: road rage, standing in an endless line waiting for a service, noisy neighbours, an irritating co-worker, a lousy boss, depression, anxiety, burn out, a psychotic episode… Anything that can drive one to feel angry, despaired, lost in a daze where nightmares seem to slip into reality, in such way that one can no longer tell the difference between what’s real or not.

Well, in Smile and its’ sequel, Smile 2, both protagonists exhibit behaviour that seems like they are losing their minds. But are they? Well, to anyone around them who can’t see the evil smiling people that are always getting closer and closer to them, they simply are going insane.

However, the circumstances are more complicated: a demon or supernatural entity that feeds on trauma latches itself like a parasite to people who witness a violent death (mostly by suicide) and forces the protagonists to commit violent actions and behave desperately. In each Smile movie, we have a protagonist who witnesses a violent suicide and then suffer from terrible hallucinations for several days until the entity forces them to commit suicide in front of someone else in order to pass on to another person.

 Yes, after watching both movies I believe that these two movies are too similar in both structure and story, although both protagonists are very different from each other and have their own personal demons, which makes each movie interesting in itself. In Smile, the protagonist is a psychologist who bears the weight of history of serious mental health issues in her family, and that leads to her isolation from her family, fiancé and piers. In Smile 2, the protagonist is a pop singer that suffered a serious car crash and struggles with both substance abuse and a deep seeded depression, which has her already isolated from the people around her from the start of the movie; in the first movie the isolation is gradual.

In both movies the existence of the demon is something that is so subjective to the people that surround the protagonists in way that makes it looks to the people them that they are simply going insane with no apparent reason. But the viewer knows what is happening since one is seeing the story from their point of view. Yet, this point of view is distorted by the demon so, what we see, along with the protagonists is not necessarily what is really happening.

It’s an interesting concept that shows horror in a different point of view and makes one think of what losing your mind could be like, in this case if the a demon possessed and forced you to see unsettling smile wherever you looked.

And, to conclude, although I believe the first movie is better than the sequel, Skye, the protagonist of the second movie is a deeply depressed person that says one of the best lines on this disease when she says to her mother, something like “I wish you could live in my head one day just to see what I feel like”. One last note, this quote is not verbatim since it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve seen the movie, still the essential idea is this: she wishes her mother could feel how she feels everyday do to her mental health (only if you suffer from depression do you know what it feels like).