Trauma as contagion Her sister, Holly (Gillian Zinser), turns her away, confessing she's spent decades trying to move on from their traumatic childhood (their mother committed suicide). Rose's erratic behavior reminds her of their mother's mental illness.
Rose, from the very beginning, is known to have experienced trauma as a child, seeing her mother overdose in front of her. That trauma is laced with guilt as she could have called for help in her mother's dying moments — but chose not to.
Is 'Smile' your typical horror movie? Not quite. While there are certainly elements of horror present, it is the metaphor of trauma that truly shines through. Trauma can be just as terrifying, if not more so, than encountering a ghost.
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.
The Smile Entity as it strangles Rose, and its most infamous quote. You can't escape your own mind, Rose. The Smile Entity, also called The Monstrosity or simply The Smile Demon, is the main antagonist of the 2020 horror short film Laura Hasn't Slept, as well as its 2022 film adaptation/sequel Smile.
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.
Rose Cotter, who witnesses one of her patients die by suicide in front of her. The shocking death triggers a domino effect that passes a curse onto Rose, who begins having hallucinations of people with creepy smiles everywhere she looks.
CANNOT stress this enough - Massive trigger warning for suicide. There was way too much of it, and not enough warning. Every 15 minutes there was another graphic suicide scene, and/or some scene involving a psychotic break.
Rose sees the monster, has a mental breakdown, and can't move. She truly and fully embodies the curse by starting a fire with her own body. Joel realizes too late that Rose has given him the curse. It's an effective ending since it doesn't seem that Rose would be able to survive this.
Despite some of its missteps, the horror film's theme of inheriting mental illness and walking down a path that you have lived dreading all your life is poignant. The world is a stage and we are all storytellers. We tell stories about ourselves to ourselves; stories that hold the power to either liberate us or trap us.
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.
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.
Smiling reduces stress. Stress and anxiety can be ongoing challenges, but smiling more often helps the mind and body release stress naturally. Smiling helps reduce stress-induced hormones in the bloodstream, which helps avoid adrenal fatigue. Smiling enhances positive emotions.
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.
With a premise as silly as a woman being haunted by a demon that makes her think people are smiling at her, writer and director Parker Finn delivers one of the strongest depictions of generational trauma, loss and mental illness within interpersonal relationships in recent memory.
Then, in the very last sequence, the demon removes its face to reveal its true appearance — a pale, lifeless entity with a seemingly endless grin. When the creature literally crawls inside Rose and completely takes her over, we're led to believe that this may have actually happened.
So, the entity uses Rose's body to pour gasoline all over the psychiatrist, lighting a match just as Joel comes through the door. 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.
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.
(I would advise caution from photosensitive or epileptic viewers, as one scene features bright flashing lights, and others involve sudden bright lights or loud sounds.)
This is an extremely scary, graphic horror movie that should not be taken lightly. I have seen my fair share of horror movies over the years but this one definitely has a different feel to it. It is chilling, unnerving, and very difficult to watch sometimes.
Smile clearly wants the audience to see the connection between Rose's curse and mental illness. Throughout the movie, characters use therapy buzzwords and often suggest that Rose's mental state is a result of her genetics and past trauma.
What happened to Rose's father? The film's opening sequence pans across a series of portraits of Rose's family, with her mother, father, and her sister Holly all happy together. Then Rose's father disappears from the pictures. It's unclear whether he died or abandoned the family.
