Smile is a 2022 American supernatural psychological horror film written and directed by Parker Finn (in his feature directorial debut), based on his 2020 short film Laura Hasn't Slept. The film stars Sosie Bacon as a therapist named Rose Cotter, who, after witnessing the bizarre suicide of a patient, goes through increasingly disturbing and daunting experiences, leading her to believe what she is experiencing is supernatural. It also stars Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Kal Penn, and Rob Morgan, as well as Caitlin Stasey playing the same character she played in the short film.
Plot[]
At a psychiatric ward, therapist Dr. Rose Cotter meets with Laura Weaver, a graduate student who witnessed her art history professor die by bludgeoning himself a few days earlier. Laura claims that an entity taking the form of smiling people has been terrorizing her and has told her that she is going to die. Soon after, Laura stumbles to the floor and begins screaming. After Rose calls for help, she sees Laura standing up and smiling. With a shard of a broken vase, Laura kills herself by slitting her cheek and throat. Rose after being questioned, goes home plagued with visions of Laura in the dark smiling, startled she drops and breaks her wine glass. Rose later sees her manic patient Carl smiling and shouting that she is going to die. Rose calls for nurses to restrain him, only to see he was asleep the whole time. Concerned for Rose's mental well-being, her supervisor Dr. Morgan Desai gives her a week off she checks a sound recording of her sessionwith Laura and found something suspicious then gets scared by a ghostly figure screaming her name, then she sees that her cat is nowhere to be found.
In the following days, the hallucinations continue, making Rose seem unhinged and dangerous to people around her. Roses husband calls her former therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott, who suggests that her problems stem from her abusive and mentally ill mother, whose death from an overdose she witnessed as a child. At her nephew's birthday party, Rose's gift had been replaced by her dead cat, horrifying the children and Rose cries hysterically. She turns to sees a party guest smiling at her and falls into a glass table injuring herself, ending the party in chaos. And she begins to suspect she has fallen victim to a curse.
Upon learning that Laura's professor was grinning at her before his death, Rose visits his widow, Victoria, and learns that he had witnessed a suicide shortly before his own. Rose asks her ex-boyfriend Joel, a police detective, to go through police records. They find several cases where someone witnessed a suicide, then a few days later died by suicide in front of someone else, who continued the pattern.
Rose tries to patch things up with Holly and Trevor, but only makes things worse as she sees Trevor is only concerned with himself after calling Madeline to help her get over the situation. Feeling betrayed, she angrily tells him off, saying that she had trusted him. Holly after Rose tries to tell her about the curse, compares Rose's behavior to their late mother, but an enraged Rose responds that Holly knows nothing of what happened. As she's goes to her car, Holly comes up calling her and when rose looks at her her neck dislocates, making her freak out
Rose's hallucinations intensify. Joel discovers that nearly all the witnesses died within a week of seeing the previous suicide, thus finding out himself Rose is cursed. The exception was Robert Talley, who instead murdered someone else. Rose and Joel visit him in jail, where he claims that the entity feeds on trauma, and the only way to escape it is to kill someone in front of a witness to traumatize them, passing the entity to them. Rose angrily rejects the option and the guy thinks she's there to bring the curse back to him and yells at her to leave.
She is confronted at home by the entity in Madeline's form, where it gleefully warns her that she is running out of time. She impulsively drives to her hospital with a knife, planning to murder Carl in front of someone to pass the entity to them, but decides she cannot go through with it. Morgan notices her with the knife, but she speeds away, prompting him to alert the police.
Rose drives to her abandoned family home, realizing that she cannot pass on the entity if she remains alone. Rose confronts the entity in the form of her mother, and it is revealed that as a child, Rose found her mother as she was dying from a drug overdose, but decided not to get help because she was young and scared. The "mother"/ entity guilt trips her then starts growing then attacks Rose, and she grabs her lamp to burn the entity and escape which is a hallucination.
Soon Joel pulls up, having tracked Rose's phone. The entity rips off its own skin to reveal its true form – a skinless humanoid creature whose body is made from the previous victims that it consumed, with multiple sets of malformed jaws, nesting within an enormous, smiling mouth. The sight of the entity's true form is so frighteningly traumatic to Rose that it causes her to have a nervous breakdown and she falls into a trauma-induced paralysis. Having succeeded at finally breaking Rose's mind, the entity proceeds to feed on her culminated trauma by forcing itself inside her body through her mouth and merges with her psyche. Joel breaks down the front door only to see Rose covered in gasoline with a match and a smile on her face then she set herself on fire passing the curse onto him.
Cast[]
- Sosie Bacon as Rose Cotter
- Kyle Gallner as Joel
- Jessie T. Usher as Trevor
- Robin Weigert as Dr. Madeline Northcott
- Caitlin Stasey as Laura Weaver
- Kal Penn as Dr. Morgan Desai
- Rob Morgan as Robert Talley
- Gillian Zinser as Holly
- Judy Reyes as Victoria Muñoz
- Jack Sochet as Carl Renken
- Nick Arapoglou as Greg
- Perry Strong as Detective Buckley
- Dora Kiss as Mom
- Sara Kapner as Stephanie
- Kevin Keppy as Nightmare Mom
- Marti Matulis as The Monstrosity