Dr. Rose Kotter works in a psychiatric hospital and provides care for mentally ill people with a sick mental condition. But she herself also receives the deepest trauma in childhood after the suicide of her mother. After that, Rose deeply blames herself and cannot forgive herself. This is what attracts the essence even more. Patient Laura, who survived the death of her professor, became traumatized and is soon haunted by an evil entity that takes the form of other people and hides behind their creepy smile.
Laura informs everyone that she is having strong and reality-like hallucinations in an attempt to convince everyone to believe her. Until a creepy smirk appears on her face, which means that the creature has possessed her. Worried Rose, who witnessed the suicide of a patient, Laura, turns to her ex-cop boyfriend Joel, who himself is investigating Laura’s death.
Rose also has the only hope for Robert Telly, who is in prison for the murder of a woman. She is left with only two choices to break the suicide chain and finish off the entity. But in order to choose the option where she can kill someone in front of a witness, she decided to go to an abandoned house and deal with the entity herself. Rose sees a terrible hallucination that is difficult to distinguish from real life. When she came to her senses and realized that everything that was happening to her now was a deception. But the creature misleads her when it assumes the form of her mother and flays its skin. At the moment when her ex-boyfriend Joel breaks down the door, he sees a smiling Rose in front of him, who is about to set herself on fire, after which he himself gets deeply injured.
A patient, Laura, is admitted to a psychiatric hospital with terrible hallucinations. She is trying to get through to everyone that she is being pursued by an evil entity, so that they would take her seriously and believe her. Then she starts screaming loudly, she has a seizure. Dr. Rose Kotter, noticing a terrible smile on the face of the patient Laura, behind which an evil entity is hiding, kills himself with a fragment from a broken pot. Rose then spots her patient Carl, who begins to smile eeriely and yell loudly that she is going to die. Soon she calls the nurses for help, but as it turns out, nothing really happened and the patient was just sleeping. Dr. Morgan has become concerned about Rose’s disturbing mental state and decides to send her on a week’s paid vacation.
After a while, Rose never got better, because terrible events still happen to her that haunt her. Her relationship with her fiancé Trevor and her sister Holly also deteriorated. Trying to get through to them about what is happening to her, they believe that she is going crazy. At her nephew’s birthday party, Rose acts scary, instead of a toy train, she gives him her dead cat, which went missing that evening. Soon, Rose sees a girl smiling in front of her, who no one else sees but her and falls on a glass table, after which the party turns into a complete nightmare. Worried, Rose decides to visit her former GP, Madeline Northcott. The Doctor admits it is possible that Rose’s problems stemmed from the death of her mentally ill mother. Which put a curse on Rose
After Rose finds out that Laura’s professor smiled at her before his death, and soon she decides to visit his widow Victoria, who believes that her husband began to behave very differently when he witnessed the suicide of one woman.
Deciding to visit her sister Holly, Rose tries to explain what happened to her situation and in the end she emotionally breaks down, after which her sister drives her out of her house. The entity soon takes on the form of her sister and begins to frighten Rose. Police officer Joel notices a string of suicides this week, except for one surviving accountant, Robert Telly, who is now in jail. Rose and Joel decide to go to Robert, but it soon turns out that the only way to break this chain is to kill someone in front of a witness so that he would receive severe mental trauma, due to which the creature is sated. Rose decides to refuse this option and leaves them.
At the moment of visiting her therapist, she is attacked by a creature in the form of Madeline and tells Rose that it is time. And when she goes to the hospital, taking a knife with her, she has a terrible illusion where she kills Carl’s patient right in front of Dr. Desai so that the curse passes to him. her car and calls the police. To defeat the essence, Rose comes to the abandoned family home where her mother committed suicide when she was 10 years old, while Joel is looking for her.
And then the evil entity takes the form of her mother, in order to alleviate the case that she had to face in childhood. In fact, Rose found her own mother while the woman was still alive. When her mother realized that she had begun to die from an overdose, she begged to call an ambulance. To call an ambulance, Rose ran away in horror, leaving her mother to die. After such an incident, she deeply blames herself. That’s why Rose chose this profession of a psychiatrist to help people like her and try to support her patients.
Is Smile (2022) based on a true story?
No, “Smile” is not based on real events. Instead, the film is based on director Parker Finn’s 2020 short film Laura Didn’t Sleep. South by Southwest (SXSW) 2020. The director was very excited about this opportunity and was honored that the studio offered him his first feature film.
Speaking about the inspiration for the film, Finn explained that nothing in particular influenced how the film was made. The director clarified that over the years it has become more difficult to scare the audience with a simple screamer. For the film, he wanted to explore the worldview of the average person and what goes on in their head every day. Moreover, Finn sought to immerse himself in the concept of how a person tries to hide his feelings and past from the world.
In the film, the director shows how a person goes through everyday life, dealing with anxieties, stresses and fears. The idea of experiencing what it might be like if your own mind turns against you is what Smile delves into. As the film progresses, Finn wants the audience to experience the unexpected on a journey that has a far from easy ending. Given that its main inspiration was the idea of life and thought, the film’s ending reflects how, just like in real life, not everything is connected like a happy story.
One of the big things Finn kept in mind was to try not to fall back into the well-known horror tropes. Although there are many elements typical of a scary story, he hoped the film would not be a simple combination of tried and tested horror elements. For the director, the film combines his ideas and elements from some of his favorite horror films. Interestingly, he really likes the hallway scene from The Exorcist III.
To create a truly frightening and frightening experience, Parker Finn went out of his way to incorporate elements from real life into “Smile”. many steps taken by the director to make the events in the film look like they could happen in real life. The idea of playing with brain functions allows viewers to strongly empathize with the protagonist.
Why the most positive smile is used to scare
In general, it is interesting that a smile or even laughter, which serve as a symbol of positive, is often used as a frightening element. The Joker in the stories about Batman, all kinds of scary clowns and other creepy characters catch worse than “serious” monsters.
I even decided to look for where the smile came from in people, because animals bare their teeth just when they are trying to show aggression.
Judging by the information on the network, the smile came from a “playful” grin: the animals allegedly frightened the partner, but showed that they were not seriously going to attack him. That is, it is curious that the symbol of kindness came from some form of light dominance.
But why is smiling so creepy? It probably has to do with the feeling of wanting to smile or laugh in a completely inappropriate situation. It seems to me that everyone at least once in their life had bouts of nervous laughter – and it’s good if they could be suppressed.
And when we see the same situation from the outside, a contradiction arises in our heads. It seems that we should be drawn to smile back (the facial expressions of the Joker performed by Joaquin Phoenix are very contagious), but we realize that this should not happen. It is from this contradiction that it becomes scary.
Yes, this is superficial reasoning caused by watching a horror movie. But I just want to say that “Smile” perfectly illustrates this situation. It seems that with the simplest methods, the authors were able to catch up with horror, and at the same time not fall into banal “scarecrows”.
Ending explained “Smile”
Much to our surprise, Smile is more than just a popcorn horror movie, as its metaphors for the long-term and inevitable nature of trauma are brought to the fore. Trauma (insert Jamie Lee Curtis voice) has a way of tormenting us no matter how hard we try to run away from it.
Rose witnesses her patient die in a bloody suicide and it’s trauma enough for a lifetime, but in the end we learn that suicide has haunted her life once before.
You see, when Rose was 10 years old, her mentally ill mother (Dora Kiss) overdosed before realizing she had made a big mistake. In a desperate attempt to survive, she begged her daughter to call 911 for help, but a frightened Rose fled in a panic, resulting in her mother’s death.
Currently, Rose is holding this guilt deep inside her, and the entity is finding a way to cling to it.
In the company of her ex-cop boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), Rose visits the only survivor of the curse, Robert Talley (Rob Morgan), in prison. Despite learning that killing another person in front of a witness can free her from her curse, Rose ultimately decides to face the entity.
She travels to the dilapidated home of her childhood, hoping to isolate herself and the entity. Thus, there will be no witnesses on which to pass the curse. While this seems like a solid plan, the entity has a way of manipulating the psyche.
In a scene that mimics the likes of The Exorcist , the entity takes the form of Rose’s deceased mother, even transforming into a hideous giant-sized version of her. More than ever, Rose forgives herself for her past, shedding her trauma in the process. She manages to set the smiling beast on fire, which in turn sets the rotting house on fire before escaping in her jeep and driving away. Evil has been defeated, hooray!
With a growing love for Joel, who turns out to be her hero throughout the film, Rose runs to his apartment, hoping to spend the night there and enjoy the comfort of his presence. There is clearly something else between these former lovers, and perhaps there was simply no time until this moment.
The energy seems still and calm until an eerie smile lights up Joel’s face. Not only does this show that Rose is still cursed, but we soon discover that she never ran away from her childhood home. The trip to Joel’s apartment was just a twisted hallucination.
Unfortunately, Rose’s smile-induced suicide came true, repeating that we cannot completely escape our deep-seated traumas. But wait, there’s more! In Smile After a harrowing final plot twist, Joel manages to track down Rose, who enters her childhood home just as she is about to kill herself. An oiled, grinning Rose is forced to set herself on fire in front of Joel.
