SMILE Reviews of the horror hit

  

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Behind-the-scenes featurette:

Clip:

Sosie Bacon featurette:

Laura Hasn’t Slept

Box office:
Smile took over $217 million worldwide theatrically even before residual releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital and On-Demand (VOD).

Full plot synopsis [contains spoilers]:
At a psychiatric ward, therapist Doctor Rose Cotter meets graduate student Laura Weaver, who explains that she recently witnessed her professor die by suicide. Laura claims she is being terrorised by an invisible entity which appears as various smiling people and has foretold her death. Laura begins screaming and panicking and Rose calls for help. Laura suddenly becomes unnaturally calm and smiles, before slitting her own throat, which obviousy terrifies Rose.

The next day, another patient, Carl, smiles like Laura did and shouts to Rose that she is going to die. Rose calls for nurses to restrain Carl, only to realise Carl has been asleep the entire time. Concerned for Rose’s mental well-being, her supervisor Doctor Morgan Desai, orders Rose to take a week off work. Rose’s hallucinations continue, leading those around her to believe she may be a danger to herself. Rose visits her former therapist, Doctor Madeline Northcott, who suggests that Rose’s problems stem from her childhood, in which she witnessed the overdose death of her abusive and mentally ill mother.

Later, Rose attends a birthday party for her nephew, the son of her older sister, Holly. When he unwraps her present, he finds Rose’s dead cat, which has somehow replaced the actual present, horrifying everyone. Rose has a public breakdown and sees a guest smiling unnaturally at her, causing her to fall into a glass coffee table and injure herself. This convinces Rose that she has fallen victim to a curse, although her fiancé Trevor believes she has gone crazy.

Upon learning that Laura’s professor was grinning at her before his death, Rose visits the professor’s widow, Victoria and learns that he 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 themselves had recently witnessed a suicide.

Rose tries to patch things up with Trevor but becomes enraged after realizing he has called Madeline to provide psychological intervention without asking Rose first. Upset, she leaves to speak with Holly, who also dismisses Rose’s belief in a curse. Holly compares Rose’s behaviour to their late mother, and Rose accuses Holly of abandoning her before their mother’s death.

Rose and Joel discover the sole exception in the chain of suicides: convicted murderer Robert Talley. Rose and Joel visit him in jail, where he claims that the entity feeds on trauma and that the only way to escape it is to brutally kill someone else in front of a witness to traumatize them. Rose angrily rejects this idea. The entity appears at her home in Madeline’s form and taunts her. Rose drives to her hospital with a knife and murders Carl, but it is revealed to be a hallucination. Rose wakes up in her car to find Morgan standing outside. He notices 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 dies alone. The entity appears as Rose’s mother, and it is revealed that Rose chose not to call for help for her mother because of her abusive behaviour. The entity attacks Rose, and a fire starts in the struggle, seemingly killing the entity. Rose flees the house and returns to Joel’s apartment. Joel smiles at Rose, who realizes this is another hallucination.

In reality, Joel has tracked Rose’s phone to her old house and finds her outside. Rose panics and runs back inside, where the entity reveals its true form – a skinless, semi-humanoid monstrosity with multiple sets of malformed jaws nesting within an enormous, smiling mouth. The sight of the entity’s true form causes Rose to fall into a trance, and the entity feeds on her trauma by forcing itself inside her body through her mouth and possessing her. Joel breaks down the front door and sees a smiling Rose set herself on fire, passing the curse onto him.

Notes:
Not to be confused with Oktober Layne’s 2022 horror film, also titled Smile.

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