 When people ask me what I'm most afraid of, I always say dark windows. It's one of those things that at first seems fair, if weirdly specific, but it makes less and less sense the more you think about it. Short, when I was a young child, I had a nightmare that I looked out my bedroom window and there was a masked face with an enormous grin staring back at me. But how does that manifest? Because it's dark a lot of the time and I much prefer being in places with windows than not. So am I just always terrified at night? What about during the day when I am passing an empty home with the lights off? Are those dark enough? And since the answer to both of those questions is sometimes, it's obviously not that simple. So I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it is that I am actually afraid of and I have figured it out. Stalkers. But more specifically the act of stalking. I'm not worried that there is some person out there in the world who's obsessively thinking about me or building a shrine upon which they plan to place my severed head. I'm afraid that I will look out my window and see someone staring back at me. Is it why I live on the end floor of a building surrounded by lights at all time in a city that's never truly dark? It fucking might be. Never needing to wonder if there is a face outside my window has been a huge relief as someone who used to put pillows on window sills because there were too many cracks in the blinds. This is why home invasion films have always been peak horror for me. They tap into my fear in a way that is actually plausible. It's not particularly likely that a random group of people could be watching me at night or break into my home while I'm sleeping. But it could happen in the way that a demonic possession or other form of haunting couldn't. So I thought that there was nothing scarier. But it seems like I was wrong. Hello by the way and welcome to the week air view. You can call me a guy with complex feelings about his face. And today I am talking about Parker Finn's feature debut Smile. It's kind of shocking how few movies have built on the ideas presented in David Robert Mitchell's 2014 masterpiece it follows. I assume you've seen it but in case you haven't here's the basic premise. Our protagonist Jay is dating a guy who is seeing people that no one else can and is clearly afraid of. They have sex which passes along a deadly curse. This curse or whatever takes the form of an entity that follows the carrier and they are the only one who can see it. No matter where they are, what they're doing, how far they go it is following them. It can take the form of strangers or loved ones but it is corporeal though others cannot see it. They can interact with it. It opens doors and breaks windows. It is for all intents and purposes. Real. I fucking love it follows. It's one of the best movies of the last decade and since the horror genre tends to latch on to successful ideas until they have been run into the ground I thought we would see more of the passing along an evil entity that looks like your family lol stories but we haven't. I can only assume it's because of how good it follows is that everyone felt like Mitchell nailed it in one and it wasn't worth the inevitably negative comparison the audience would make. Or maybe no one was sure how to do it without being a straight ripoff but of course there's more than one way to skin a cat. Parker Finn took his 2020 short film Laura Hasn't Slept in which a girl tells her therapist about a recurring nightmare that she has been having about a man smiling at her always wearing different faces before realizing that she is currently in a nightmare and this therapist is that man and then he blended it with a heaping helping of it follows and just a dash of the ring. Our protagonist Rose is a clinical therapist who tries to help a young woman who is seeing people that no one else can and is clearly afraid of. This woman slits her throat right in front of Rose which passes along a deadly curse this curse or whatever takes the form of an entity that haunts the carrier and they are the only one who can see it no matter where they are what they're doing how far they go it is there with them. It can take the form of strangers or loved ones it can mimic them too but it has no corporeal form it is entirely in the carrier's mind but the mind makes it real. And sure maybe it's a little manipulative of me to use the same language to describe both of these films since they aren't actually the same but it's not unfair. The similarities go beyond the concept as Smile uses many of the same cinematic techniques to build tension and yeah long zooms have been a staple of the genre for decades but that like 180 degree pan to reveal Rose's first smiling apparition was it follows as fuck. Still it feels more homage than knockoff and Smile absolutely has its own identity and visual language the most obvious choice is the extensive use of negative space. When Rose is alone and therefore at her most vulnerable asterisk she's almost always on one side of the screen or the other drawing your eye to the emptiness in the frame as you tense up and wait for something to appear. Oftentimes nothing does but every so often. Sorry Smile is much scarier than it follows with two separate moments involving phone calls still giving me the chills as I think about them. I definitely wouldn't go as far as a friend of a friend who called it the scariest movie ever but the more I have sat with it and the more it has sat with me the more I get where he was coming from it's not the movie itself though I have been so tense during horror movies that I've literally cried and Smile didn't do that to me but the underlying idea is so fucking unnerving that I haven't fully been able to shake it even a week later so let's talk about mental illness. I'm always leery when horror movies tackle crazy as a concept movies in general do a pretty bad job of it but horror movies far too often use mental illness as simple shorthand for dangerous and violent see the lowest rated subject on this youtube channel when the reality is that people suffering from mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators and like I figured that a film that centers on a hospital therapist whose typical patient has been involved in a traumatic incident wasn't going to go in that direction and I was right Finn clearly has compassion for the mentally ill but his feelings on trauma are a little more suspect before we get into that though I want to talk about why I find Smile so damn scary because in general supernatural stuff doesn't really get me at least not beyond the four walls of the theater in the moment a well-made supernatural horror movie will totally grab me but as soon as I leave that setting I'm just thinking about the movie and not the horror that it could potentially represent more human that definitely gets under my skin and will have me looking away from dark windows or avoiding empty streets or whatever because if you avoid those things you're fine the reason Smile is so fucking scary is because it takes the unavoidable nature of a haunting but places it inside a more human context my ex used to say that they were actively concerned at least once a week that they would come into the living room and I wouldn't be there not because I was out for the evening but because I had never existed that everything that we had done and were doing together was just a prolonged schizophrenic episode and it wasn't obviously but it made me think about what Smile was really showing curseside Rose witnessed something truly horrible a smiling woman staring straight at her while slicing her own throat with a broken piece of pottery that shit would fuck anyone up and I expect anyone who went through that would see that smiling face looking at them in the darkness but what makes this method of passing along the evil so unique and uniquely horrifying is that it isn't confined to a house or even a building of any kind and that just aren't that many horror movies that start in public places you know haunted shit usually involves going somewhere you're not supposed to be and home invasion movies are more about being in the wrong place at the wrong time you know why are the mass figures in the strangers doing what they're doing because Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman were home and if they had decided to stay out for a nice dinner well it would have been a different kind of movie the strangers would have knocked gotten no response and then moved on to a different home but Smile could have started in a restaurant it can start anywhere folks in Rose's chain witnessed suicides at office school gas station work conference etc etc honestly the home is probably the safest place to be because it seems to not make house calls at least not until you've been caught up in it but once once you have been there's no place left to go so here's that asterisk Rose is never safe while the first time she sees the entity she is alone in her home the first time they interact she's at a busy hospital in a room with a wide open door a later scene has her being spooked during a literal child's birthday party as more than a dozen people watch her freak the fuck out over something only she can see and that leads to the usual isolation of a protagonist ranting about something no one else is experiencing and so no one else believes it the birthday incident is the last straw for her remaining family tie which yeah sure but i felt like this aspect of the film was kind of rushed i understand what it was trying to do by mirroring Rose's disbelief in the young woman's story with everyone else's disbelief in hers but i didn't totally believe the turn i appreciate that her initial response is to try to get antipsychotics from her psychiatrist and then that she doesn't immediately accept that these aren't delusions but it felt a little disingenuous to see her explaining things to the people around her using tactics she knows won't work because they didn't work on her literal days before well her sister and fiance don't react well they don't really react unfairly either having largely the same reaction she's had and the fact that there's no acknowledgement of this mere days later resulted in a bit too much whiplash for my taste while also feeling kind of mean spirited towards rose so i get that it has to happen fast because here's that asterisk again the entity isn't real and can't actually hurt her irl or whatever so she's technically always safe therefore we need some kind of arbitrary deadline to make the plot progress case in point the ring there's that same seven day deadline and those smiles entity is much more active in the interim being more like penny wise than sadako slash samara there's that still same longer term view any given hallucination or haunting is scary but it's not really the main concern whatever is at the end of the week is i think penny wise is a useful analog actually because if the entity has any clear driving purpose it's to so fear to bring people to their breaking point and then give one final public push that keeps the trauma train going i guess we're back to trauma huh there's an implication that the selection of each carrier is not completely random and that those who are marked have something in common a history of trauma like the first thing we know about rose is that she had a traumatic experience as a child finding her mother's corpse after an apparent suicide where her sister got on with her life after this rose never really did she became a therapist who specializes in trauma and so i guess it's fitting that when she got cursed it was by an entity that feeds specifically on trauma and the traumatized but it's also pretty fucked up i don't think there's a message that the audience is supposed to take away from smile i don't think it is intended to mean anything but it sure does say something and to talk about what we need to talk about the ending rose knows that there is a way in which she survives by brutally murdering someone in front of someone else she can pass along the trauma to a third party an even more vicious take on the ring survival mechanism of showing someone else a copy of the cursed tape and condemning them to death i compare it to the ring and not it involves because passing the titular it along isn't a permanent fix you know if it kills the next person either before they have passed along or down the line after working its way back up the chain you will become the target again whereas smile's entity will in fact leave you alone forever fairly shocking fake out of side this never seems like a viable option for rose which led me to wonder if we were in for another lights out situation lights out is a 2016 horror film by director and youtuber david f sandberg is largely a solid spook time but it has one of the more infuriating endings in recent memory as the protagonist mother must kill herself in order to make the spooky monster go away the correct solution to the monster problem is suicide and by doing it she does in fact save people i know there is a hypothetical second film that might change this but in the context of the currently standalone film that's the message i hated it then and i hate it now and i was real curious if smile was going to acknowledge the fact that by its own rules a private suicide is that same correct solution if rose drove her car off a bridge in the middle of the night or whatever that would be the end of the line and she would be the final casualty but it never comes up i i actually kind of wish it did though it feels like something that would have occurred to her even if she didn't actually want to go through with it and it could have added a different angle to the final confrontation in particular but either finn didn't think about it or more likely he didn't want anyone else to in any case that confrontation was really the only way it could end right rose had to go back to the bedroom where she found her dead mother all of those decades ago where she would confront the entity in the form of her mother and say that it was time to move on and finally mean it she wasn't going to let that horrible event define her and then something would happen and that something would tell us if the movie thinks that it is possible to move past trauma or if everyone is just kind of fucked and i guess everyone is just kind of fucked of course it doesn't get to be so simple she has the classic i'm not locked in here with you you're locked in here with me moment and like lights the thing on fire and escapes the equivalent scene and it follows where the group of friends takes down the monster in the form of her deceased father sets up jay's choice to just move on she knows that it's not over but she's not going to keep looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life she comes out the other side stronger and for a minute it seems like rose doesn't indeed win she faced her demons and did what she should have done a long time ago and at first i believed what i was seeing too but that was kind of silly of me smile has an absurd number of fake outs how could i expect it to not end with just one more the revelation that she never even made it out of the house is a genuinely terrifying gut punch and in short order she is assimilated and self-emolates in the presence of her ex-boyfriend continuing the chain dude's a cop so obviously he will find a person to murder in the next seven days and just get on with his life without any repercussions it's a real bleak ending made an even clearer fuck you to the audience by the choice of credits music lollipop by the cordettes finne pulled the same trick with laura hasn't slept after a big jumpscare and laura ripping her own face off he cues up a throwback style crooner called i had a dream and i could just imagine him laughing hysterically in the edit bays he did so face frozen in a big fucking smile 7.9 out of 10 thank you so much for watching thank you particularly to my patrons my mom my cat cat sarah kata benjamin schiff anthony coal elliott fowler greg lucina cojo phil baits willow i'm the sword liam knipe claire bear tailored indice angio-medicine design and the folks who'd rather be read than said if you like this video great if not oh well if you want to see more please subscribe hope to see in the next one