Smile has a pretty simple premise — a menacing figure hounds you unending, never letting the grin slip for a second until you're forced to pass it on through a violent death. That basic premise masks a horrifically offensive and even dangerous depiction of mental health.
The demon manifests almost like a hallucination, using mental health imagery to stigmatise and isolate the victim. The only way for them to be freed of the nightmare is to kill themselves, furthering that imagery, but this simply spreads the trauma to someone else and continues the vicious cycle. It&rsquo✱;s a nasty message of suicide being an act of selifshness that only harms those around them, loaded with insults like ‘headcase’ and ‘insane’ that are never 🌃grappled with.
Mental health representation is often problematic. Batman villains are typically painted as maniacs who are carted off to an asylum as the stories come to a close. That’s no anomaly - mental health is typically a tool in pop culture to paint people as monsters, explaining away ruthless behaviour. Smile turns that into a literal monster only the victim can see. The parallels to actual psychosis are striking, and that’s why everyone around the main character Rose Cotter initially❀ believes it to be a post-traumatic breakdown as a result of witnessing a suicide.
The figure might not be a literal hallucination, but the idea of the demon is clearly an allegory for mental health. It feeds on trauma, using that to jump between hosts and keep itself nourished. Trauma is continuously depicted as an infectious disease that spreads from person to person. Even Cotter’s mother, who is separate from the entity entirely and suffeꦆrs from her own severe mental illness, is portrayed as a burden who drags those around her down.
You can also murꦛder someone to pass on the deꦆmon, but this is another troubling depiction of mental health, that sufferers are violent criminals.
At first, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, assuming that Smile would take these themes and use them to unravel how shunning someone who needs help only worsens mental health, forcing people to hide their problems before they inevi🎃tably burst to the surface. Instead, it doubles down on the idea that trauma is infect♋ious and that mental health sufferers are burdens who should be hidden away from society.
Cotter decides to break the cycle by isolating herself, meaning that nobody can witness her death and 'take' her trauma. But she is soon visited by her ex-boyfriend, and so the demon forces her to set herself on fire and continue the cycle. The implication is that you need to separate yourself from everybody or you put them at risk; trauma is t🌄o be fought alone. It’𝄹s a bitter and dangerous message.
Despite all this, Smile has been a rousing success. It topped the box office last week amidst a viral marketing campaign with murmurs of a sequel already abound. But all Smile does is perpetuate harmful stereotypes about mental health, and that’s the most terrifying thing about it. Smile does little to grapple with ꦦthe ramifications of the stigmas and attitudes it plays with. Cotter’s fiance calls her insane, ambushes her with her psychiatrist, and then leaves. There’s no𝓰 resolution - instead, the movie shows he was right to step back. In stepping back, he saves himself, as does her sister who also abandons her.
The ending passes the curse on and leaves the door open for future outings, which given Smile’s success, feels inevitable at this point, and that’s worrying. Mental health as a villain is so normalised that Smile is flying under the radar, but it's a deeply problematic movie, one that flagrantly misunderstands what people with mental health issues need and deserve.