Smile (2022)
Smile is a 2022 American supernatural psychological horror film in which therapist Rose Cotter begins experiencing terrifying and unexplained events after witnessing a patient’s shocking death. As the disturbing visions intensify, she becomes convinced that an evil presence is stalking her. To survive, Rose must confront her traumatic past and uncover the truth behind the curse before it consumes her.
Narrative Score
Full Plot & Ending Explained
Intro
Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist still haunted by childhood trauma, meets graduate student Laura Weaver in a psychiatric ward after Laura reports that an invisible entity has been stalking her since she watched her professor Gabriel Muñoz kill himself in a brutal fit of self-destruction.
Turning Point 1
Laura insists the entity can wear the faces of smiling people and that it is coming for her; after a terrifying seizure-like breakdown, she suddenly calms, smiles ominously, and slits her own throat with broken glass in front of Rose, leaving Rose shaken and desperate to make sense of what she saw.
Turning Point 2
After the suicide, Rose begins seeing Laura’s smiling apparition at home and at work, and when another patient named Carl smiles at her and screams that she is going to die, Rose discovers he was asleep and that the threat may not be in her head after all; her supervisor Morgan forces her to take a week off.
Turning Point 3
Rose’s hallucinations intensify as she visits her former therapist Madeline, who connects her collapse to the childhood trauma of watching her abusive, mentally ill mother die by overdose; Rose then tries to understand Laura’s case, learns from Laura’s widow Victoria that Gabriel had witnessed a suicide before his own death, and realizes the curse may pass to whoever witnesses the victim’s death.
Turning Point 4
At her nephew Jackson’s birthday party, Rose brings a toy train as a gift, but the party turns into horror when Jackson opens the box and finds the corpse of Rose’s cat Mustache inside; Rose panics, sees a guest grinning at her, crashes into a glass coffee table, and finally accepts that something supernatural is stalking her rather than a simple mental illness.
Turning Point 5
Rose investigates the pattern behind the deaths and meets Trevor, her sister Holly’s fiancé, but her unstable behavior pushes Holly further away; Rose tracks the curse back through a chain of witnesses, learns that the entity feeds on trauma and isolates its victims, and becomes increasingly convinced that only by confronting the original source of her mother’s death can she break the cycle.
Turning Point 6
Rose returns to her childhood home and relives her buried memories, including the night her mother killed herself after years of abuse and instability; the entity manipulates these memories into a horrifying confrontation, forcing Rose to face the truth that she has been carrying unresolved guilt and fear since childhood while the smiling figure closes in on her.
Ending
Rose is ultimately lured into a final confrontation where the entity reveals itself as a grotesque, towering mass of consumed suffering; unable to escape the curse, she is overtaken by it, and the film ends with the entity transferring to Joel, a detective who has been pursuing the case, after he witnesses Rose’s death and becomes the next target.
Cross-checked against Wikipedia and other public film references. View on Letterboxd ↗ The Narrative Score above is an experimental 5-axis rating, not a critic score.