"Smile:" I highly recommend you watch this new horror movie for its stunning vivid exploration of the devastation of suicide and grief

post 1 of 2, this one has no spoilers (post 2 of 2 will)

Happy Sunday, dear subscribers!

Last night I watched a horror film (streaming on Paramount Plus) called Smile. Now initially in the preview, it looks like your standard psychological horror movie: there’s weird eerie visually disturbing colors and blood, police helping a psychiatrist solve a complex murder mystery, a possible supernatural element to the crimes, etc.

But that’s not the HALF of it!!

It is a stunning beautiful horrifying exploration of a woman who is haunted by grief over the loss of her mother who committed suicide when she was a little girl. She grows up to be a psychiatrist in order to help the mentally ill as an attempt to atone for not being able to help her mother years ago.

And the metaphor is on point. Each person in the series of 19 suicides smiles a terrible frozen malevolent smile right before taking their own life in front of someone who will then subsequently, do the same thing within 7 days.

When do we smile when we aren’t really happy? When we’re struggling with grief, with depression, with despair, with anguish. We smile when we’re sad. We smile when we’re uncomfortable. We have a cultural epidemic of wearing a mask to conceal emotions that if shared, might hurt another person, maybe even someone we love.

Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin Bacon, is only 30 years old and plays the part of Dr. Cotter with the soul of a wounded woman twice her age. It was remarkable to watch regret and despair and powerlessness drive the character slowly insane. The filmmakers toy with us about the nature of the good doctor’s unbearable pain: is there really a force of evil at play? Or is it the trauma of witnessing a suicide itself that is the true impetus for anguish spreading like a virus?

I’m going to write an in depth film review of this movie because it is so astonishingly remarkable in its beauty and symbolism, and deserves much more analysis. The writing is nearly perfect; the casting and the acting and directing were outstanding. Also, the main character has all the traits of an INFJ who gets swallowed into the shadow grip in order to receive that survival instinct-based surge of energy necessary to “face her fear” during the climax of the movie.

Someone I loved committed “slow suicide” and another committed regular suicide; in post 2 of 2, I’ll include some of the ways I was able to forgive myself for being unable to prevent their deaths. That post may take days to fully hash out, and it occurred to me that some of you might enjoy watching the movie first since my second substack on it will have many spoilers.

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