Smile is an American psychological-horror movie from the year 2022. The film stars Sosie Bacon in the lead role and Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan and Caitlin Stasey. The movie has a plot which loosely could be similar in my opinion to the movie The Ring. Unlike a video tape as in The Ring, here the curse spreads through seeing the afflicted person kill themselves. In terms of the visuals and the overall creepiness, Smile creates its own following however. The jump scares though are a bit too many. Anyways, I will delve into the plot first and then give my 2 cents about the movie.
The movie begins at a psychiatric ward, where therapist Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) meets with Laura Weaver, a graduate student. Laura explains that she witnessed her art history professor die by suicide a few days earlier. Laura then claims that an entity that only she can see, taking the form of smiling people, has been terrorizing her, and has told her that she is going to die, and nobody believed her when she told them. Soon after, Laura stumbles to the floor and begins screaming. After Rose calls for help, she sees Laura standing up, calm and smiling. With a shard of broken pottery, Laura kills herself by slitting her throat.
Later, Rose sees a manic patient, Carl, smiling and shouting that she is going to die (however, in terms of all the creepy smiles in the movie, the first one – Caitlin Stasey as the student Laura, wins hands down). Rose calls for nurses to restrain him, only to see he has been asleep the whole time. Concerned for Rose’s mental well-being, her supervisor Dr. Morgan Desai gives her a week off. In the following days, Rose’s hallucinations continue. This leads those around her to believe she is unhinged and possibly dangerous. She visits her former therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott, who suggests that her problems stem from her abusive and mentally ill mother, who died from an overdose, which she witnessed as a child.
Rose attends her nephew’s birthday party later. The gift Rose had brought has been replaced by her dead cat, horrifying the children. This leads to a public breakdown in which she sees Stephanie, one of the party guests, smiling at her and trips back onto a glass table, hurting her wrist. This incident convinces Rose that she has fallen victim to a curse. However, when Rose tries to tell her fiancé, Trevor, he doesn’t listen, as well as everyone else, thinking she’s crazy. Upon learning that Laura’s professor was grinning at her before his death, Rose visits his widow. Rose learns that the professor had also witnessed a suicide shortly before his own. Rose asks her ex-boyfriend Joel, a police detective, to go through old police records. They find several cases of people having died by suicide in front of someone else, all of whom had recently witnessed a suicide themselves.
Rose tries to make things better with Holly and Trevor, but finds that Trevor is only out for himself and Holly compares Rose’s behavior to their late mother. When Joel discovers that nearly all the witnesses died within a week of seeing the previous suicide, he comes to believe that Rose is cursed.
The only exception being a man called 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 brutally kill someone in front of a witness to traumatize them. Rose angrily rejects the option and leaves. 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, and walks into the hospital and murders Carl in front of Morgan, but he rips his face off, revealing she is in another hallucination. Rose wakes up in her car. 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’s curse 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. The entity attacks Rose and pins her to the floor, but she smashes a lamp over its head, setting it on fire. She leaves the house, symbolically letting go of her trauma. Rose drives back to Joel’s house, asking to stay the night, but Joel starts smiling at her and tells her he’ll stay with her forever, showing that Rose was in a hallucination the whole time. Joel pulls up, having tracked Rose’s phone.
She panics and runs back inside, barricading herself in the house, so Joel cannot have the curse passed to him, but the entity reveals itself, having still been in the house, and rips off its skin to reveal its true form – a skinless, semi-humanoid monstrosity whose body is made from the previous victims that it consumed, with multiple sets of malformed jaws, nesting within an enormous, smiling mouth (this is one of the best and truly horrifying scenes in the movie). 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 merging with her psyche. Joel breaks down the front door and walks upon Rose setting herself on fire with a smile, passing the curse onto him.
So, all in a fun little tale wasn’t it? Just kidding. The movie has a lot of strong selling points – the primary being a different story after a string of repetitive Hollywood horror flicks. Smile does copy slightly from The Ring as I mentioned earlier but movie’s plot could not be more different. However, what I would have liked is a little bit of history into the source of the monster and a little bit of legend around it. The Ring gave us Samara but here all we get is a smiling monster. Susie Bacon plays the tortured protagonist quite well but the supporting cast barring the victims and the monster are mediocre at best. Kal Penn is wasted but these days most of his performances have been sub-par at best. Ok so I promised to talk more about the jump scares and there are plenty of them – literally one in every corner. It’s so frequent that instead of focusing on the movie, you are preparing your body for the jolt of the next jump scare. A moderate approach would have made things better.
All in all the movie, is quite good and definitely an entertaining horror movie. The movie does capture the claustrophobic environment that comes from being trapped in a curse where you feel you are unable to get out despite every attempt made at escaping. It also has a decent background score which hits the right notes against the environment of creeping horror.
JAY’S VERDICT
I would suggest go for this one, if you haven’t already. Smile will make your insides smile – atleast the jump-scares will.
