The following contains spoilers forSmile 2andThe Medium. It also includes discussion of child abuse, rape, and suicide.Reader discretion is advised.Smile 2doesn’t have anything positive to say about trauma. The sequel to Parker Finn’s feature debut is a grim, haunting, and intense affair that reasonably emulates the feeling of an actual nightmare. It feels almost unfair to suggest that the film has a message. It’s more devoted to constant panic than its thematic elements. Still,Smile 2is embroiled in modern horror cinema’s favorite theme: trauma. Its statements on the subject bring to mind nothing so much as Bloober Team’s 2021 game,The Medium, and the intense negative reaction it inspired.
Horror media can often get at topics that feel impossible to discuss elsewhere. The heightened emotions behind a scary story often force viewers to open their pounding hearts to something difficult.Body horror can interrogatethe absurdities of human flesh, monsters can force people to confront themselves, and a haunted house can unleash interior rot upon the exterior. Horror media is obsessed with trauma right now, but not every take on the concept works.
Smile 2andThe Mediumhave similar messages
At their core,Smile 2andThe Mediumare stories about the ways in which trauma spreads. Anyone who has seen/played both works understands the connections, but it’s worth breaking them down separately.
What isThe Mediumabout?
Released in 2021,The Mediumis a psychologicalhorror game by Bloober Team. It borrows heavily fromSilent Hillwithout the intelligence it took to create those titles. The game follows Marianne, a woman with an innate connection to the spirit realm that allows her to communicate with the recently deceased. Marianne travels to an abandoned vacation destination to investigate a series of paranormal happenings that seem to tie back to her own mysterious past. Through the adventure, she encounters a malevolent spirit called The Maw, who enacted the violent massacre that closed the resort by possessing victims and forcing them to kill others.Marianne then discovers thatThe Maw emerged from her sister, Lilianne.
Lilianne created The Mawas an outpouring of trauma after Richard, a friend of her father’s, molested her as a child. It later becomes clear that Richard was only partially responsible for his actions, as his previous trauma created a monster in him, eventually forcing him to commit rape. The Maw seeks to invade Marianne and use her power, prompting Lilianne to beg for death. She reasons that the only way to stop The Maw is to die, depriving it of its host. Marianne struggles with the decision, briefly considering taking her own life instead.The Mediumreassures Marianne with the apparent thesis statement “you may’t always save everyone,” which is reinforced with a genuine achievement of the same name. The game cuts to black withoutrevealing which of them Marianne shoots.
It’s fair to say thatThe Medium’s message suggests that people who cannot move beyond their trauma are doomed and must be allowed to die for the benefit of others. That’s certainly the take that most commentators came away with. YouTube content creatorBobVidsunleashed a gripping Twitter thread in which he accurately assesses the grotesque decision to frame trauma victims as dangers to themselves and others. The game straightforwardly states that some people are beyond saving, asks the audience to sympathize with an abuser, and ends with the overt suggestion that death is the only solution for some. It’s not just ill-advised or problematic. The game’s morale borders on immoral. To quote Jade King writing forThe Gamer:
The Medium assumes we aren’t capable of growth or recovery, and it should be ashamed of cobbling together a narrative with such a laughable misunderstanding of psychology and hurtful assumptions around cycles of abuse and how we can go about resolving them.
What isSmile 2about?
Smile2’s narrative is hardly happierthan that ofThe Medium. The film follows Skye Riley, a pop star who has just become the latest victim ofSmile’s central villain. The unnamed demon that haunts the franchise is a unique threat that follows a few rules. Essentially, theSmiledemon spreads to victims of trauma. The host must have already suffered some grievous tragedy involving the loss of a loved one. The demon can infect a new victim by forcing its current one to take their own life, passing the trauma onto the witness. Once inside, the entity changes perception, alters reality, and forces its victims to do terrible things to their loved ones. The only way out is to murder someone else in front of a witness, pushing the infection off to the unfortunate onlooker.Smile 2opens with Joel,Kyle Gallner’s lone survivorfrom the first movie, trying to kill someone to escape his death, only to accidentally pass the infection to an innocent and die while running away. This eventually leads to Skye receiving the demon when her drug dealer dies in front of her.
Skye suffers the usualeffects of theSmiledemon. She sees things that aren’t there, causes problems by reacting to hallucinations, and faces the disbelief of her loved ones. After coming to terms with the reality of the situation, Skye meets Morris, a man who claims to have a solution. A victim could theoretically die, depriving the demon of a host and stopping the chain. Morris suggests temporarily stopping her heart in the hopes that it would leave her dead body before Morris would revive her. This exchange, along with about half of the movie, is revealed to be a hallucination via the demon.Skye winds up on stage, where she violently kills herself in front of thousands of traumatized potential new victims. Not unlikeThe Medium,SmileandSmile 2have nothing to offer victims aside from misery and death.
Why didSmile 2feel so different?
The Mediumcaused several commentators to condemn its messaging. WhileSmile 2isn’t being held up as a sterling example of mental health awareness, it didn’t receive a similar response. Both stories depict trauma as a vicious monster that invades the minds of its victims, forcing them to do terrible things. Both works straightforwardly suggest suicide as the only potential escape. Part of the difference certainly involves the crimes in question.Smiledepicts plenty of murders, but it never wades into topics of child abuse or sexual assault. That doesn’t feel like enough to draw a hard line between the works.The Mediumends without a definitive final moment, butSmile 2explicitly states that there was nothing Skye could have done. All of her efforts were in vain, and she could only exist in agony long enough for the demon to set up the ideal conditions to use her to hurt the maximum number of people. IfThe Mediumcould be reasonably read to suggest the only cure for trauma is death, couldSmile 2be read to imply that victims will only ever hurt themselves and others?
Oddly enough, the thingthat makesSmile 2workwhereThe Mediumdoesn’t is cruelty. No one interprets the fate of the characters in theSmilemovies as anything other than torture by the most evil imaginable being. The cruelty actually pushesSmile 2away from any form of messaging. This isn’t what “should” happen; it’s explicitly the opposite. It is the work of something otherworldly. Part of this presents an interesting separation between interactive and non-interactive media.The Mediumshows the audience a traumatized victim, makes her responsible for a massacre, and forces the player’s avatar into a situation where the only solution is ending their life. That “you can’t always save everyone” line is the game’s thesis statement. The game tells players to be okay with some people dying for the greater good. It insists they accept the fact that some victims have to die to end the cycle of trauma.Smile 2does not want viewersto be okay with what happens to Skye.
The difference betweenThe MediumandSmile 2is in intention. The best reading ofThe Mediumwould suggest that the writers came up with a grim ending for no other reason than shock value. Shock value, suffering, and constant panic are thestated goals ofSmile 2. It’s rare that the desire to cause fear and emotional pain would make art less problematic, but that’s just how big a failureThe Mediumwas.
