Smile is an American supernatural horror thriller movie. The movie had a theatrical release on September 30, 2022, in the United States, and in India, it was released on November 18, 2022. The movie is also available on the OTT platform Amazon Prime Video. Smile also premiered at Fantastic Fest on September 22, 2022.
The movie is written and directed by Parker Finn and is based on his 2020 short film. Laura Hasn’t Slept. He has only directed two short films, The Hidebehind and Laura Hasn’t Slept, before directing Smile.
Smile Cast
The lead role in the movie is played by Sosie Bacon and who plays the role of Rose Cotter, who is a therapist. She is known for he parts in 13 Reasons Why, Narcos: Mexico, and The Last Summer. Then we have Caitlin Stasey, who plays the role of Laura Weaver.
Kyle Gallner plays the role of Joel and is a police officer and the ex-boyfriend of Rose Cotter. Jessie T. Usher plays the role of Trevor, who is Rose’s husband. Robin Weigert plays the role of Dr. Madeline Northcott, who is a therapist. Kal Penn plays the role of Dr. Morgan Desai, the boss of Rose. Rob Morgan plays the role of Robert Talley, the lone survivor. Gillian Zinse,r as Holly, plays the role of Rose’s sister.
Smile Storyline
The movie begins with a woman on the verge of death due to a drug overdose,e and Rose sees her. The scene shifts to a Hospital where Dr.Rose Cotter, a therapist who attends Laura Weaver, was going through mental trauma as she saw a professor killing himself with a hammer. Dr. Rose tries to console her, but Weaver gets all tensed up and says no one can help her.
She further says that from the moment she sees the professor killing himself, an entity continuously haunts her. Dr. Rose tries to calm her down by saying that this is nothing but her trauma, but Weaver is firm that this is not her trauma and says that the entity continuously follows her and gives her a creepy smile seeing that she loses control of herself.
Weaver loses control of herself and starts shouting. Seeing this, Dr. Rose calls for help, but suddenly Weaver stops screaming and stands still in front of her, giving her a creepy smile. She slits her throat with a broken vase.
Dr. Rose gets very disturbed by this incident,t and to calm herself down,n she starts to drink and then sees Weaver, who stands in a corner, giving her the same Smile. This leaves her in shock, but in the meantime, Trevor enters the scene and consoles her, and she shares the incident with him.
The scene shifts to a restaurant where Rose and Trevor go out for dinner with Rose’s sister Holly and her husband. Holly invites them to her son’s birthday party, but Rosehasd works that day and turns down the invitation. Further, Holly brings up the topic of selling off their childhood home. Rose refuses, and the conversation turns into an argument.
The next day Rose goes to work, where her ex-boyfriend pays a visit, but Rose doesn’t entertain him and goes back to her office. While she was in her office, Rose received a call from Holly. She apologized for her behavior last night and again reminded her of the birthday party.
While Rose was speaking to Holly on the phone, she saw Weaver down in the car parking, giving her the same Smile. Seeing Weaver, Rose rushes out of her office but encounters her patient Kin who is giving her a smile. Rose goes to check on him, and Kin gets hysterical and says, “even you are going to die.”
Rose calls security and gives a restraining order for Kin, but when the staff goes to Kin’s room, they find out the total opposite. Rose’s boss suggests she go on paid leave as she was disturbed by the Weaver incident.
Rose was packing a gift for her nephew when the security alarm of her house started to buzz. She goes on to check the main entrance, but it is locked, and then she notices the back door of your house is open. Seeing this, she gets scared.
She receives a phone call from a lady from the alarm company and questions about the alarm. Rose says that no one has entered the house, but the lady questions if she is sure and did she really not see anyone entering her house and asks Rose to watch her back.
As she was about to turn back, the phone started to ring again, and Rose realized that the phone call was her imagination and this time it was an actual call from the alarm company. Both police and Trevor enter the scene, and Trevor asks her when she alerts the alarm, but Rose doesn’t remember a thing.
Rose starts to look for her cat, Mustache, in order to feed him, but she can’t find him anywhere. Late in the night, while Rose is asleep, she gets a nightmare of her mother dying of a drug overdose, and she starts to watch the tape of Weaver killing herself.
While trying to analyze her behavior, she listens to a whisper in the tape and hears her name being called out, “Rose.” She tries to listen to the tape twice,e and just then,n someone with a scary face appears in front of her. In order to protect herself, she holds a knife, and Trevor sees her doing so and gets scared.
The next day Rose pays a visit to her former therapist, Dr. Madeline, to share the strange things happening to her and asks her to prescribe some medicine, but Dr. Medeline says that the Weaver incident must have triggered her childhood trauma where she saw her mother dying. She suggested Rose take some rest and resume her therapy.
The next day she goes to attend the birthday party of her nephew. When Rose’s nephew opens the gif, the finds the dead body of Mustache, Rose’s cat. This takes everyone by shock, and Holly starts to shout at Rose while Rose tries to defend herself, and she herself in shock seeing the dead body of a cat. She starts crying and hurts herself by falling off a table.
Trevor and Holly brought Rose to her psych ward, and her condition was getting worse and worse. On their way back home, Rose tries to convince Trevor that she is not insane and she is being haunted by the same entity who killed Weaver, but Trevor refuses to believe her and blames her by saying that the problem is in her genes.
She started researching Weaver and discovered that Weaver was in her college when professors came in front of her smiling and killed himself with a hammer. While doing her research, she has someone whispering her name, and she sees her dead mother, who calls out for help, but Rose ignores her and goes off to sleep.
The next day Rose poses as a reporter and visits the professor’s house to know the root cause of the problem. There she meets the professor’s wife, and by talking to her, she gets to know that her husband fell ill all of a sudden. He used to talk to himself used to get up in the middle of the night shouting and screaming.
She said that her husband used to see an entity smiling at him, and Smile used to drive him crazy. She also shows some paintings by professors where professors depict the face of the entity. All these strange things started when the professor attended a conference a few days back before his death where he saw a woman killing herself wearing the Smile smile on her face.
Rose tries to enquire more about the woman, but the professor’s wife understands that she is not a reporter and asks her to leave. In order to gather more information on that woman, Rose visits her ex-boyfriend, a police officer.
They find out that the woman who killed herself in front of professors saw someone on the highway killing himself with a smile on his face. They further dug deep and found out that the man who killed himself on the highway was also smiling as he killed himself.
Gathering all the information,n Rose then visits her husband, who had called in Dr. Madeline, the doctor tries to talk to Rose, but it turns into a heated argument, and Rose leaves. She then goes to her sister Holly, but even she refuses to see any of the proofs and to hear her side of the story.
At this point, we all come to know that in their childhood, Holly left Rose with her mo,m who used to be very cruel towards Rose, and also it was rose who saw her mother dying, and it left a deep impact on her life, and she could never get out of that trauma.
Rose gets a call from Joel, who informs her that there have been a total of 20 direct links related toSmileSmile, where each one of them saw someone killing themself with a smile on their face. Only Robert survived even after he saw his boss killing himself in front of him.
They go to see Robert, and he tells them that the entity capitalizes on the trauma of an individual,l and once you are a victim,m you can either kill yourself or someone else. Rose, in order to save everyone,e decides to stay aloof in her childhood home. She lits a lantern and sits in one corner when she hears her mother from her room.
Her mother says that she loves Rose, and it is the entity that ruined everything. Rose did not save her mom as she was treated very badly by her and was a monster. Her mother transforms into a giant monster and overpowers Rose, and just when she is about to kill herself, Joel enters the scene and sees Rose kill herself, and the movie ends at this point.
Smile Review
Smile is a brilliant psychological thriller where we see trauma-related horror and different themes and layers. If we see the story of the movie, Rose sees a patient die in front of he,r which results in her seeing an entity that sometimes appears as Weaver and sometimes as someone unknown.
With each passing day, the entity starts to drive Rose crazy, and she gets to know that she has become a part of a curse line in which if you see someone dying in front of you, you will be left with two choices either you have to kill yourself or kill someone else.
In the end, Rose tries to confront the entity by herself, but the entity seems to dominate her by using her own childhood trauma of her mother dying of a drug overdose. This results in Rose killing herself, but while she is killing a self, Joel arrives on the scene and becomes the victim of the entity.
The topic of mental health has been highlighted a number of times in the movie where Rose saw her mother die of a drug overdose and had an abusive upbringing,g and she could never get out of that trauma. Instead, she started to live a fake life where she never allowed anyone to get close to her and used to pretend that everything was fine in her life.
We see that when she was asked to take a paid leave by her boss for her mental health, she lied about that to her sister, Holly, and said she had taken the day off so that no one gets to know about her mental state. When she pays a visit to Dr. Madeleine after witnessing the death of Weaver, Dr. Madeline tells her that she hasn’t yet healed from the trauma of her dead mother.
She can only overcome it if she has control over it. In one of the scenes, we see Rose covering up her dark circles with makeup and practices to smile, meaning she never really understood what her therapist meant to as,y and she kept on faking things in life. We see a lot of upside-down shots in the movie, which signifies the character of the movie sees her pain in an upside-down frown.
The movie used a lot of metaphors. The day Weavekillsed herself in the hospital, Rose gets called by her boss in his office and asks if she was working late last night, and she feels her boss is trying to accuse her of something, and she feels guilty.
The same day as she was leaving her office and was about to close the do, she heard her phone ringing, answered, and went back to attend to the call as the guilt of leaving her mother to die in her childhood used to haunt her.
The movie has not defined or depicted the entity appropriately, but we can assume it is a form of human PTSD, depression, etc. The entity will want you to kill or pass on the curse to someone of your own.
When Trevor and Holly do not help Rose and do not understand what she is going through, and Joel is the only one who is trying his best to help out Rose, she waits for Joel to come in search of her and kills herself in front of him, passing on the curse to Joel.
Our Verdict
Although the movie comes under the genre of horror and thriller, it has hardly explored that side of it. The movie is more inclined towards mental health issues and trauma that stays within an individual for a lifetime. The movie has not defined/shown the proper form of the entity, ty, nor did it show its origin. We give the movie a total rating of 3 out of 5 stars.
Our Rating: ⭐ (3/5).
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