REVIEW: SMILE and SMILE 2

It was a smiley time this Hallowe’en, with Smile 2 in the cinemas and Smile itself hitting streaming services to cash in on this. It’s been a quick turnaround for writer-director Parker Finn, who released his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept in 2020, built on it with the feature-length follow-up Smile in 2022 and turned out the second feature this year. In that short time, the Smile sequence has established itself as one of the most popular and celebrated horror franchises of the last decade.

Does it deserve this? Well, yes and no. There’s no denying that these films are effective shockers, combining psychological terror with body horror to unpleasant effect. Smile itself, though, doesn’t quite live up to the hype. Originally titled Something’s Wrong With Rose, aesthetically tied more to Laura Hasn’t Slept which it ostensibly follows from directly, with Caitlin Stasey reprising her role, albeit briefly, as Laura, so that she can pass on the (literally) nightmarish curse to psychiatric therapist Dr. Rose Cutter. While Laura has been haunted by a terrifying being that smiles at her from behind different faces, the unsettlingly wide rictus grin didn’t become the focus on the manifestations until the feature, hence the change to the punchier, more intriguing title. It makes for a good poster, too.

The best thing about Smile is undoubtedly its star, Sosie Bacon, who gives an impeccable performance as a woman whose sanity is slipping under constant assault. Focusing on a psychiatrist is a good move, putting her directly in harms way by exposing her to someone already plagued by the… I’m just going to call it the Smiley Thing. It also puts her in the unusual position of a horror protagonist of understanding the dangers to her sanity she is experiencing, making it all the more feasible how long she refuses to accept what is happening is real, and also intelligent enough to admit when she can’t deny the evidence in front of her any longer.

Rose has already experienced intense trauma due to witnessing her mother’s suicide as a child, her entire life revolving around mental illness. Trauma and guilt are at the heart of Smile’s story, with the Smiley Thing specifically channelling and transmitting through unbearably traumatic experiences. It forces its victims – perhaps hosts is a better word – to relive their most painful experiences, while visiting new horrors on them. It warps its victim’s perceptions, so that at no point do they, or the viewer, know whether what they are seeing is real. Most disturbing for Rose is how it enjoys appearing as the long dead, but most effective as horror is when it appears as the still living, taking its time before it reveals itself as an illusion, usually only when reality intrudes and Rose realises that the person she thought was in front of her is actually somewhere else entirely.

It's not as if Rose has it easy in her day-to-day life, having to cope with an overwhelming job at an understaffed hospital and a complex romantic situation – her fiancé (Jessie T. Usher) doesn’t understand her, while Joel, her ex (Kyle Gallner) frequently finds himself in her workplace in his capacity as a police officer. Worst of all is Holly (Gillian Zinser), Rose’s self-absorbed and materialistic sister. Yet you can sympathise with everyone who begins to turn on Rose as her mental health deteriorates, and she is accused of appalling acts that she can’t remember committing.

This is where Smile works best. Finn’s script perfectly captures the experience of declining mental health, as your own mind betrays you, putting you in a place where you can’t trust you perception, memory or actions. It paints the fear and heartbreak as the people closest to you find they can’t cope with the changes in you, who turn away as you need them the most – but also the relief and gratitude towards those who do stick by you and try to help.

The most effective moments are when Rose is made isolated and afraid by her distrust of her own reality. The grotesque smiles on the Thing’s various faces are disquieting, but it’s the moments where you realise that what you’ve been watching, what Rose has experienced, never happened, or happened in an entirely different way to how you thought. Unfortunately, the film relies too much on jump scares which, although they do their job, just aren’t as interesting, original or effective as the core horror of the story. Still, it’s all in service of the Smiling Thing’s process, as it uses these to continually wear aware at Rose’s nerves. The Thing acts as a generic horror movie shock jock a lot of the time, precisely because this helps its mission of driving its victim to the brink. And also just for the kicks.

I really like that there’s no explanation for what the Thing is. It’s clearly supernatural, and acts like a curse, passing on from victim to victim after no more than a week of pushing them to breaking point. Beyond that, we have no idea, although we do eventually glimpse its alleged true form (if it even has such a thing). Horrible though it is, it simply isn’t anywhere near as frightening as someone you thought was on your side slowly breaking out into that appalling grin.

So Smile works, largely down to the powerful central performance of Sosie Bacon, but it never quite reaches the penetrating horror it’s really going for. It’s also hard to avoid comparisons to other films with similar conceits, such as Ringu and It Follows, which gave us implacable, relentless phantoms before and did it better. Smile 2, though, is as much an improvement on its predecessor as that was on Laura Hasn’t Slept. It leans into the gore and violence far more than Smile, which would normally be the sign of a lack of imagination and faith in the story. Finn finds the right balance here, though, using revulsion in service of the psychological horror that plagues the new protagonist, Skye Riley.

Skye is a considerably less likeable main character, but remains compelling and believable. The multi-talented Naomi Scott is absolutely excellent in the role. She has the singing and dancing skills to make Skye a believable pop sensation, and also the acting chops to give an incredibly tense and sympathetic performance as Skye’s sanity goes through the wringer. It doesn’t hurt that Scott is one of the most beautiful actresses in the world, either.

Centring the sequel around a troubled pop star gives it an entirely different aesthetic to the first film. It’s altogether bolder and more colourful, another reason why the increased violence works: everything is heightened. Skye is altogether different to the selfless Rose; her trauma comes from the pressures of fame, her own self-centred lifestyle and her reliance on substance abuse, and the brutal car crash that has left her in physical and emotional pain. It’s no surprise when we find out that the crash was her fault, but the visions of waking up bloodied in the wreckage are among the most haunting in the film. Skye also has to deal with her mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) who has commodified her daughter and puts her career over her wellbeing (although as everything is seen through Skye’s perspective it’s entirely possible her mum isn’t nearly as hard-nosed in reality).

Also giving strong performances are Miles Gutierrez-Riley as Skye’s PA Joshua, and Dylan Gelula, Skye’s once best friend who has been out of her life since a particularly venomous attack by Skye in the lead-up to the accident. Smile 2 picks up a week after the first film, rather perfunctorily dealing with a loose end from that story, before fast-forwarding another week to pass the curse onto Skye as she is just starting to put her life and career back together. There’s the sense that Skye might finally be able to make herself into a better person if giving the right environment, but once the Thing latches onto her, her already shaky grasp on reality is broken.

While the gore is increased, it’s once again the psychological aspect of the Thing’s attacks that hit hardest. It’s more relentless this time round, with entire hordes of zombified, smiling avatars assailing Skye. (Nothing in the film is more terrifying than the little girl at the signing and photo-op, whose manic grin may make her the single creepiest child in horror movie history.) There’s a little more exploration of what the Smiley Thing is in the second film, but it’s all speculation and, importantly, every source of information is unreliable. The Thing seems to be learning from its victims as well, playing with them and their sense of reality more and more. There’s a sense that the entity is aware that it’s in a horror movie and is gleefully playing with the tropes that brings, and is fully genre-savvy. You realise as the film progresses that the Thing has always been in charge of the story.

Smile 2 takes the concepts of Smile further and with greater style. Smile 3 is already in the works; filming is set to start next year so it will likely keep the schedule going and arrive in 2026. It’s hard to see where else it can go beyond Finn’s own promise of “more off the rails;” there’s only so much gore and violence, and only so traumatic its themes can get, before it simply becomes another example of shock for shock’s sake. If he can deliver an improvement once again, though, then Smile 3 will be something very special indeed.

REVIEW: Possum

 

I've been on something of a horror trip lately, catching up not only on recent releases but several from the last few years which I'd never quite got round to watching. Possum is a 2018 film written and directed by Matthew Holness, based on his earlier short story published in The New Uncanny (which I now simply must get hold of and read). If, like me, you know Holness best as his alter ego Garth Marenghi (author, prophet, dreamweaver) then Possum is entirely unlike the kind of horror film you'd expect from him. Garth Marenghi's Darkplace was a ludicrously over-the-top, deliberately hammy, parodic horror series. Possum, in contrast, is utterly humourless. It's quite astonishingly grim and serious in its presentation and subject matter.

Possum stars the underrated Sean Harris as Philip, a children's entertainer who we meet on his way back to his grim Norfolk home, having been thoroughly disgraced by an unknown incident in his work. Philip is a puppeteer, a creepy enough medium when done well, and he doesn't seem to be a performer at the top of his game.We never learn the nature of what happened, and we never learn how Philip normally lives his life. When we meet him, he's in dire straits, returning back to the rotten house he grew up in, still crumbling and ashen from the fire that killed his parents. Forced to live with his bullying and decrepit uncle who brought him up, Philip begins reverting to an almost childlike state, losing himself as he returns to the site of his cruel and traumatic upbringing.

To make matters worse, a teenaged boy has gone missing, and the shuffling, mumbling Philip is an easy target for suspicions. Oh, and Philip is being haunted all the while by Possum, a nightmarish puppet of a character he invented in childhood, that he lugs around in a duffle bag. We can assume that Possum had something to do with whatever incident led to Philip being kicked out of the puppeteer trade, but it's real significance is as a manifestation of everything that preys on his damaged psyche. He repeatedly tries to dispose of the puppet, even burning it, but Possum somehow turns up again and again, lurking in his tiny bedroom, even invading his dreams.

Possum is a deeply unsettling film, haunting and uncomfortable in a way few films these days are allowed to be. Holness has said that he was inspired by monochrome silent horror films of the 20s and 30s, and the deeply disturbing British public information films of the 70s. There's a definite feeling of the latter here, the same seedy, threatening version of reality that those short PSAs subjected kids to back then. (Thank god I only ever saw them secondhand, as an example of how utterly weird British television used to be.) There's a disturbing uncertainty as to how much of what we see is immediately real, how much is a result of Philip's deteriorating sanity, and how much is the truth slowly being uncovered.

Sean Harris is exceptional, giving a performance weighed down with a tangible sadness, perpetually on the edge of full breakdown. Philip is discomforting and untrustworthy throughout, even as he is a wholly sympathetic protagonist. Almost as good and even more distressing is Alun Armstrong as his black-nailed, yellow-toothed Uncle Maurice, a viciously cruel and loathsome character. Yet even between these two men who clearly hate each other's guts there are moments of tenderness, which only makes the cruelties worse.

There's not a great deal to the plot of Possum, but what there is keeps you guessing, wrongfooting you by leaking just enough information to lead you to the obvious but wrong conclusions about what's going on with Philip. Holness's direction is complemented by subtly uncomfortable electronic music and sound by the Radiophonic Workshop, also helping lend a 70s texture to the film. Possum itself is a remarkable creation, a revolting mishmash of spider-like limbs and unidentifiable bits of discarded taxidermy, crowned by a chalk-white cast of Harris's own face. Yet, even as disturbing this creation and its manifestations are, it's the performances by Harris and Armstrong that stick with you long after watching.

WHO REVIEW: Once and Future: Coda - The Final Act

(A few spoilers herein.)

The Once and Future series comes to a belated conclusion, marking Doctor Who's 61st anniversary, which a nice enough idea I guess. I lost interest in this special series, intended to mark the 60th anniversary last year, and never caught the original ending. I grew tired of the increasingle arbitrary combinations of characters and creatures that Big Finish were throwing in. When it reached a team-up between Jackie Tyler and Lady Christina, I stopped ordering them.

This extra little story was far more tempting, though. For one thing, it's not really a chapter of Once and Future's degeneration story, but a prelude to the upcoming Fugitive Doctor series. You'd call it a backdoor pilot if the series hadn't already been recorded and made ready to go. We still haven't had Jo Martin play the Doctor alone, as here she's sharing the limelight with the War Doctor (spoiler alert I guess, but he's the one was degenerating up and down his timeline). This is an interesting pairing; the two outlier Doctors, both inserted into the continuity retroactively. The numberless Doctors, both of them not quite the Doctor we're used to.

It's a pity, of course, that John Hurt is no longer with us, as having him actually take part in another anniversary story and act against yet another Doctor would be a treat. It's never going to be the same having an impersonator standing in for the real deal. Hats off to Jonathon Carley, though; his impression of Hurt is exceptional. This is the first time I've actually listened to Carley beyond a couple of clips and his appearance on Doctors Assemble during lockdown. It's uncanny, by far the most convincing of all the new-old Doctors. Of course, being a good impressionist isn't enough; fortunately Carley's a solid actor as well.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that he's better here than Martin in. Not that she's bad, but there are certain lines where her delivery is a little stilted, where it sounds like she's reading from the script. (I know she is reading from a script, but it shouldn't sound like that.) For the most part, though, she's a pleasure to listen to, and while she has to share the limelight with another Doctor, she gets plenty of time to lead the story and show us what her Doctor can do.

The story is simple but rather great. The Fugitive Doctor is sent by her superiors in the Division to track down a time-travelling war criminal and take him out. The War Doctor, from his perspective, is being targeted by a time-travelling assassin. Neither Doctor is aware that their enemy is another version of themselves. They're ideal incarnations to pit against each other: one has let go of his moral code in order to fight the Time War, while the other has yet to develop that code. Neither is quite the Doctor as we've gotten to know them, and are more similar to each other than their many other incarnations (that we've met so far, at least).

Indeed, the alleged ruthlessness of the Fugitive comes across far better here than in her introduction, where she just carried a big gun and played the sort of dirty tricks the Doctor always plays. This is a Doctow who'll raise an army to get the results she wants. The Warrior does the same, although it turns out his judgment and aggression has been affected by outside factors. This is the one element of the story I really didn't like. That's what the War Doctor should be like, he shouldn't need to be pushed into doing it.

Fixing these Doctors up with Benny is a stroke of genius. She's become perhaps the archetypal audio companion, and knows the Doctor just about as well as anyone. I'm fairly sure she's met more versions of the Doctor than anyone now, even if only briefly (I count fifteen - the first nine numbered Doctors, the Twelfth, the Valeyard, Muldwych and Unbound, and now Fugitive and War). She's the best person to hold both these iterations to account when they stray from what, to her and to us, the Doctor stands for. 

Lisa Bowerman is as great and as sardonic as ever, Isabel Stubbs makes for a fine Elizabeth I (who recognises a younger version of the Doctor she met at the 50th, but he doesn't know her) and even Chase Masterson doesn't sound out of place in her random, but welcome, appearance as Vienna Salvatore. As for the decision to include the Voord... well, I'm always partial to a bit of Voord, and while their about the least interesting sounding creatures, they work well enough in the story. Their involvement even ties into the Four Doctors comic event, where we learned that they were involved in the Time War and had their histories tampered with. (Whether this was a deliberate link or just a case of a similar idea cropping up twice, I don't know, but it's a nice touch either way.)

The agency that eventually turns out to have set the Doctors against each other is apparently already well-established in the Time War audios, but the dialogue suggests they're being set up to tangle with the Fugitive Doctor again in her own series. If this release can indeed be viewed as the beginning of that story, then it should be a lot of fun.

Placement: The Fugitive Doctor has already cut ties with the Division, so this is after Doctor Who: Origins. For the War Doctor, it's after the rest of Once and Future, right in the middle of the Time War. For Benny, it's after her adventures with the Unbound Doctor.

WHO REVIEW: Doctor Who: Origins

Prior to Big Finish getting Jo Martin on their expanding roster of Doctors, the only significant appearance of the Fugitive Doctor outside the TV series was this, a 2022 miniseries by Titan Comics. Titan's main Who writer, Jody Houser, scripted the story; she's a steady pair of hands with a good grasp of different Doctors, and her Thirteenth Doctor range was pretty solidly good. Her regular collaborator Roberta Ingranata provides the artwork, with Warnia Sahadewa providing some excellent colours.

The trade edition collects the four issues, plus the nameless strip that was given out for Free Comicbook Day 2022. This is a fun way to start the collection, pitting the Fugitive Doctor against a small-scale but entertaining threat and saving a bunch of kids in the process. It ties in nicely to the real and fictional history of Doctor Who; the Doctor arrives in 1962, implied to be one of her first visits to Earth (at least, that she remembers), predating the series itself. It's a brief mission, but she finds herself starting to like humans and the Earth. There's a fun coda, in which the First Doctor arrives a year later, having decided this is where he wants to hide out with Susan. He might not remember being the Fugitive, but the link is in there somewhere.

The main story deals with another mission for the Division, and while it's made clear that the Doctor is sent on plenty of diplomatic and rescue missions, there are plenty of more underhand assignments, and she isn't given the full story on all of them. The Doctor is assigned a temporary assistant named Taslo (because there's got to be a companion), new and naive but holding her own secrets. They're sent to take out a cult formed from various aliens who are allegedly threatening Gallifrey, by any means necessary.

There's more to it, of course, and it's no surprise when we find out the Division has being lying to the Doctor's face, but their motives are interesting. In spite of being very directly involved in the outside universe, these early Time Lords are just as rulebound and inflexible as those of the TV series' era, terrified of change and of anything that they view against true Time Lord life. It's clear the Doctor is becoming disenchanted with her role as an agent, but this is the mission that finally makes her decide to go on the run (I guess that's a spoiler, but it's hardly a surprise). 

It's a strong story, and the comics medium suits the bold, brash and colourful Fugitive Doctor. While it looks like audio will be her main home for the foreseeable, I'd love to see some more graphic adventures for her, either as Division agent or Fugitive.

Television Heaven's 25th Anniversary Special - the greatest TV programmes of the last 25 years

The preeminent TV review website, Television Heaven, has reached the ripe old age of 25. Laurence Marcus started the site back in December 1999, and under his oversight it's grown through the 21st century to become an exhaustive and ever-expanding repository of televisual knowledge and opinion. I've been writing for it for about half that time, which somehow seems even more astonishing.

To celebrate, Lol has published two extensive articles critiquing the best, most important, and most impactful programmes of the last 25 years. First, I urge you check out his remarkable list of The Most Important Programmes of the 21st Century, examining the five shows he considers the most vital, powerful and game-changing. Programmes that genuinely changed audiences and even the world, using documentary and drama to explore the most important facts and issues of their times.

Following that, Lol has just put up 25 Shows in 25 Years, a collaborative effort by TVH's crew of regular writers. Each of us has been assigned a particular genre of television from which to pick our five must-see shows. Not an easy task, but between us we managed it. John Winterson Richards has chosen his top five historical dramas; Brian Slade chuckles at his favourite five comedies; Jennifer Ariesta tackles modern drama; and Sunday Summers explores the best of Reality TV.

As for me - well, naturally, I was assigned science fiction and fantasy. My picks are right down the bottom of the article, and believe me, choosing just five was no easy task. (One will be pretty damned obvious, but my other choices may surprise you.) Of course, there were many deserving series that had to be left off, not to mention far too many that remain patiently on my watchlist. You'll no doubt disagree passionately with my choices. Don't write in, it's just for fun! Actually, do write in - tell me your top five!