SMILE

Stars: Sosie Bacon, Jessie Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robin Weigert, Caitlin Stasey and Kal Penn.
Writer/Director: Parker Finn

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Try telling non-horror types that the best horror films hold a mirror to society and/or humanity, and you’ll get some variation on “harrumph”. Horror movies exist to exploit and manipulate base fears, they’ll say; that most just use loud noises and fake blood to give thrill-seekers an in-the-moment cinematic sugar high; that a key role of horror films is to disengage the brain and tap the instinctual, not the intellectual.

Horror types know that sometimes that is true, and are hugely grateful for it, but that some really great horror films are also deeply insightful. Parker Finn’s SMILE has a foot strongly planted on both sides of the horror film divide, and emerges as one of the best of its kind in recent memory. You’ll shriek and shudder and cover your eyes, as the stylishly visual horrors unfold before you, but you’ll be drawn into the story of a woman facing off against an evil entity that metaphorically addresses the debilitating impact of depression and cyclical trauma.

A terrific Sosie Bacon plays psychotherapist Rose Cotter, a principled young woman who has foregone profitable private practice to offer aid to those in underfunded community mental health care. Her morning is upended when a frantic patient (Australia’s own Caitlin Stasey) starts screaming at her that she can’t escape people hideously grinning in her direction. One horribly bloody moment of self-harm later, Rose is now faced with nightmares of her own, as the toothy entity starts manifesting in the most terrifying ways possible.

The essence of writer/director Finn’s narrative is in Cotter’s backstory, which is revealed to be one rife with family trauma and untreated mother-daughter issues. In a lesser genre work, such undercurrents would be hinted at but then jettisoned in favour of the ghoulish byproduct of such sadness, but SMILE is a work that spells out very clearly the ties that bind the horrors of the past with the persons we are today. 

Specifically, it speaks to the shocking statistics that indicate suicide begats suicide; that those impacted by loved ones who kill themselves are then cursed to carry the burden of crippling, sometimes fatal, pain. 

Some may baulk at the use of severe mental health issues as the crux of a story that presents outwardly as a supernatural thriller. But genre fans know that horrors real and imagined can share the same space, and SMILE provides a smart, sad, shocking argument for their cause

ROCKS IN MY POCKETS

Voice Cast: Signe Baumane.
Writer/Director: Signe Baumane.

Rating: 4/5

Latvian-born, US-based filmmaker Signe Baumane draws upon a rich history of European animation to propel Rocks in My Pockets, her charming, incisive and very contemporary study of generational depression and suicidal tendencies.

The dreamlike work recounts the struggle with mental illness experienced by the women of Baumane’s family. Raising questions of how much family genetics determine who we are and if it is possible to outsmart one’s own DNA, this landmark film engages with wit and empathy via visual metaphors, surreal images and a twisted sense of humour; it is an animated odyssey encompassing art, matriarchal angst, strange folkloric stories, Latvian nature, history, the natural world and the artist’s own sense of longing.

Utilising the structural and symbolic framework of a century of conflict in the Baltic region, Baumane undertakes the daunting artistic and intellectual task of presenting the crippling impact that the darkest of mindsets had upon her grandmother Anna, her cousins and ultimately, herself. Stop-motion techniques, papier mache landscapes, simple colour-pencil flourishes and traditional 2D cell animation combine to profound and blackly comic affect to convey themes which explore rarely spoken-of elements such as infanticide, the mechanics of hanging oneself and patriarchal tyranny.

Baumane served as assistant to the great animator Bill Plympton, the Oscar-nominated creator of such memorable works as Guard Dog (2004), Your Face (1987) and Idiots and Angels (2008). His influence is clear, predominantly in surreal sequences that defy real world physical properties. Other inspirations include the metaphorical embracing of the animal kingdom as used by Russian visionary Yuriy Norshteyn (The Fox and The Hare, 1973; Hedgehog in the Fog, 1975); the surreal oeuvre of Czech auteur Jan Svankmajer (Alice, 1988; Faust, 1994; Little Otik, 2000); and, Persepolis (2007), the Oscar-nominated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s female-centric graphic novel by director Vincent Paronnaud.

Yet Baumane has also crafted a unique and vivid animation landscape of her own. From her grandmother’s attempts at suicide on riverbank in a 1920’s Latvian forest to the claustrophobic shadows of modern New York City where the director mulls over self-harm, Rocks in My Pocket proves an insightful, cathartic experience in bonding for Baumane and her audience. Like all great art, her animation is borne of a need for truth and demands, and rewards, one’s intellectual and emotional engagement.