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.
That's commendable, but the jump scares sometimes undermine the film's most important message: We hide real trauma behind a make-believe exterior. The delusions and visions Rose experienced led her to a literal place that allowed her to deal with her family trauma and truly accept her fate.
While not much of its character has been shown, the Smile Entity portrays itself as a malevolent and sadistic being that appears to find great pleasure in psychologically tormenting its victims, driving them to complete insanity before ultimately making them kill themselves.
You can't escape your own mind, Rose. ~ The Smile Entity, taunting Rose about how she will never be able to get rid of it. The Smile Entity is the main antagonist of the 2022 horror film Smile.
Smile turns that into a literal monster only the victim can see, as though it's a hallucination. The parallels to actual psychosis are striking, and that's why everyone around the main character Rose Cotter initially believes it to be a post-traumatic breakdown as a result of witnessing a suicide.
SMILE Ending Explained | Full Movie Breakdown, Hidden Details, Easter Eggs And Review
Is Smile based on trauma?
Ok so the movie Smile is based around a curse/entity that feeds and spreads through trauma. The main character Rose gets the Trauma both from her mother's death when she is young and also seeing her patient who had the Trauma die violently.
But the biggest sin of “Smile” is that it just isn't scary. The movie has to rely on fakeout jump scares like a burglar alarm and even opening a can of cat food because it knows it can't pull off scenes with actual danger or violence. A bad dream sequence can't be taken seriously because Rose would never act that way.
Rose doesn't and, ultimately, that patient takes her own life right in front of her. Soon after, Rose starts having visions of a smile entity herself. It's that simple; witness someone who's infected take their own life, and you wind up with the curse yourself.
The monster in Smile is a humanoid creature who has a huge grin, many jaws, and no skin. The monster essentially eats people and then those people become part of their body.
Finn says the face at 1:48:20 is a “true look at the evil thing that's been hiding behind all the smiles.” They called the entity Lollipop — thus explaining the use of The Chordettes' “Lollipop” at the start of the end credits — and this is what happens at the end of every cycle as the beast physically enters the ...
Rose initially panics, but starts smiling evilly, presumably because that her racist beliefs about black people would be right, as Chris would end up acting like a beast. Chris, either now unwilling or too exhausted to kill his former girlfriend, stops strangling her.
Then Rose does something she has probably done in therapy a million times: She confronts her mother's ghost, forgiving her younger self in the process. She turns and walks out of the room, but the monster follows her, morphing into a tall, pale, thin creature that fills the doorframe behind her.
As Joel walks in, Rose is wearing that familiar creepy smile and has covered herself in gasoline – about to light a match. So no, Rose does not survive in Smile and even worse, it seems the curse has found a way to keep itself going, with Joel now presumably set to be its next victim.
Rose's body is smiling while she burns away, and we can see in Joel's eyes he will be scarred for life by that disturbing suicide. Joel's life won't last long, though, as he's now the entity's next victim. In the end, there's no way to escape trauma.
Rose begins experiencing hallucinations induced by the demon. Shortly after, she has trouble finding her cat, Mustache, and its tragic fate is revealed during her nephew's birthday party. The boy opens Rose's present to discover her cat's dead body.
After causing the most inner turmoil that it possibly can, the unnamed monster kills its victim and leaps into the most traumatized witness to continue the trend. However, the film implies that dealing with one's trauma healthily could be the most effective way of killing the monster once and for all.
Smile 2, the sequel to the breakout horror film, has been confirmed by Paramount and is set to have a theatrical release. The release date for Smile 2 is October 18, 2024, approximately two years after the release of the original film.
In the end, Smile has all three of those endings. Rose brutally stabs a terrified patient to death at her hospital in front of her screaming boss, Morgan (Kal Penn). But that turns out to be a dream she's having while passed out in her car in front of the hospital, and she flees the hospital and Morgan in horror.
Fully possessed by the demon, Rose douses herself in gasoline and sets herself on fire — just as the real Joel bursts inside her home and witnesses her death, becoming the next victim.
A well-used method throughout the film is the technique of inverting camera angles so that you see the city from an upside-down point of view or from side angles. By inverting the landscapes, you see the world as askew. This puts you into the mindset of Rose.
With the colors, we wanted to do something unusual. We had read this study that was from back in the sixties where they found out that this sort of Pepto Bismol pink color somehow was supposed to make violent inmates less violent. So my production designer, Lester Cohen, and I, really grabbed onto that.
Smile's messy treatment of mental illness and trauma throughout one hour fifty-five minutes seems to be intentional and is bound to leave you feeling uncomfortable. The theme of inheriting mental illness and walking down a path that you have lived dreading all your life is poignant.
Smile is rated R by the MPAA for strong violent content and grisly images, and language. Violence: People are seen cutting, stabbing, and burning themselves and others. A dead cat is shown. Corpses are seen bearing a variety of grisly injuries.
The Smile movie explained the metaphor for a person's control over their mind in response to trauma, and the pressure people feel to cover up their struggles with fake happiness. As the creature makes it clear to Rose during the Smile ending, she is a prisoner of her own mind.
