October is the month of nightmares, in which we agree to dream bad dreams together. This year, Parker Finn’s Smile has touched all the right nerves at the box office. Its premise is smart, and Finn takes a remarkably sure hand in the execution. He resists the temptation to exploit his audience with the unearned jump scares and cheap gore that have become lamentable staples of the genre.
But Smile ultimately falls apart in the third act, and for a telling reason: The movie raises, but fails to confront, the modern misgiving that clinical psychiatry cannot soothe all the anguish of the human soul.
TILL: RACIAL DIVISION AND REDEMPTION
The nightmare pursuing psychotherapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a kind of trauma demon that leaps from mind to mind by forcing its victims to watch and then perform a gruesome act of self-harm. Rose is particularly vulnerable to this kind of torment because she witnessed her own mother’s suicide as a child, which is what makes her mind “so inviting” as a site of possession.
When she sees a patient slit her own throat, Rose finds herself menaced by visions of figures from her otherwise tame life, all bearing the forced smirk of the title and a promise that she will be next. It’s an economical metaphor for what therapists call the “trauma cycle,” in which collateral victims of other people’s dysfunction reenact the suffering in their own lives and pass it on to others.
But is the demon just a metaphor, or something more? Smile never quite manages to ask or answer that question. The most tantalizing scene is one in which Rose’s own therapist, Madeline Northcott (Robin Weigert) makes a house call. “You have wounds that never fully healed,” says Madeline, but Rose has already self-diagnosed: She is suffering, she insists, from “fleeting moments of stress-induced hallucinations.”
This diagnosis comes along with a proposed solution. Rose demands a prescription for Risperdal, an oral antipsychotic medication. As the conversation breaks down, though, it becomes clear that Rose is not talking to her therapist at all: This is yet another manifestation of the supernatural antagonist wearing the therapist’s face, her lips splitting open into the signature grin as she glides toward her victim. The real Madeline is somewhere else entirely.
But if she had been there, what could she have done to help? At this point the film begins to unravel as it looks fixedly away from its central question: Who or what is really pursuing Rose? Is she in fact just experiencing a neurochemical deformity to be smoothed or sliced away by the ministrations of a trained professional? Or is this an entity unto itself, with appetites and desires more sinister than can be dreamt of in our philosophy?
The possibility that such entities might exist or that our hearts might fall prey to sorrows that psychiatry can neither describe nor cure is so fearsome that we can apparently only face it obliquely, even in a horror movie.
The mind is not a machine; mechanical malfunctions such as “trauma cycles” and “neurochemical imbalances” are not the only kinds of assault under which it can labor. Perhaps the most frightening possibility of all, to a modern audience, is that clinical analysis — however helpful it can be — is not capacious enough on its own to account for or alleviate all that we suffer.
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No surprise, then, that the other big Halloween movie this year is from a franchise, Halloween, whose iconic villain terrifies us precisely because he embodies the limits of modern psychology: Michael Myers is the patient that cannot be cured. Or at least, he cannot be cured by our preferred kind of doctor.
It is no longer fashionable to make reference in such contexts to ideas such as “evil” and “the soul.” But maybe what we are realizing by half-measures through our horror movies is that we need such concepts to make sense of things. These demons that are haunting the edges of our sight have no place in the modern lexicon of therapy and medication. But to really exorcise them, we will have to face them head-on.
Spencer Klavan is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and host of the Young Heretics podcast. His forthcoming book, How to Save the West, is available for preorder now.
