Yes, another horror movie. Stop me if I have said this before, but I don’t know why I do this to myself. Smile (2022) is a movie full of everything that I can’t stand watching: jump scares and blood.
The film follows Rose, a therapist who works with those experiencing mental health issues. Rose meets a PhD student named Laura, who recently witnessed a professor at her school beat himself to death with a hammer. Laura claims that after this occurred, she has been haunted by an entity that only she can see.
During their session, Laura begins to scream and reach her throat, which prompts Rose to call for help. Laura calms herself and stands up, smiling. She picks up a piece of a flowerpot that broke during her episode and slits her own throat.
That night, Rose returns home, obviously shaken from the experience. She sees a vision of Laura in her home, who is simply standing there smiling at her. Her fiancé, Trevor, returns home, which prompts her to snap out of her vision.
Morgan returns to the hospital the next day and visits another patient who is insistent that he is going to die. Rose freaks out, calling for guards to restrain him. However, this time, Rose is experiencing visions. The patient never said these things.
Her boss, Morgan, tells her to take the week off to collect herself. During this week, Rose’s conditions would worsen, but she does try to reclaim her mind.
After a disagreement with Trevor, Rose goes to meet her ex-boyfriend, Joel. Joel is a detective, so Rose asks him for help in tracing back previous suicides. Joel discovers that the chain of witnessing a suicide, and the witness then committing suicide themselves, goes back at least 20 cases. After 20 cases, someone who witnessed a suicide did not kill themselves, but instead killed someone else.
Joel and Rose go to visit this person in prison to discover why he did not kill himself. This is when the movie began to lose me. The man tells Rose that the “entity” feeds on trauma, so it will take a sacrifice of someone else if the murder is traumatic to someone else. Despite learning this information, Rose withholds it from Joel and instead runs off by herself.
After this, Rose returns to the home, where we learn she experienced her mother’s death from an overdose. Rose believes that being alone is the way to break the chain, so she decides to isolate herself in the abandoned home, where she meets the entity face-to-face.
At first, Rose is successful at subduing the entity and sets it on fire. The entity seemingly dies, but after a few minutes of a false vision, Rose is snapped back to the house, and the entire scene with the entity burning occurs to have never happened.
Joel ends up getting to the house, where he discovers that Rose is. After his arrival, the entity takes hold of Rose, seemingly entering her mind. Joel is able to break the door down, but finds Rose, doused in gasoline.
Rose turns around to Joel with a smile. She is holding a box of matches and lights it, setting herself on fire. Joel experiences the suicide of Rose, and it appears that the cycle will never be broken.
Below, you can find Jessica’s review, where you can find out a secret she kept!
“So, unbeknownst to Cyrus, I had actually kind of gotten a little bit of a glimpse of Smile before. I know I had started it before, but I couldn’t remember how far I had gotten into it. Right away, as the movie got going, I realized that I hadn’t gotten far at all.
I’m really glad we finally sat down to watch this together. This was a movie in my realm, a complete thriller, horror type of movie. I love them, and I liked this movie. I will say I was not expecting the ending, which was nice, but I didn’t like the ending because it felt like we had been strung along for a while just to be disappointed by the main character’s fate.
It was crazy to me when we found out that the main actress was dealing with these things she’s seeing and hearing, and all these hallucinations within four days. I was like no freaking way, this feels like it’s been a month that she’s been dealing with this. Either way, she dealt with all of that just to end up dying anyway.
I was super irritated about that because I was like, “Oh shoot, she’s gonna find another way around it,” like when she had set the demon on fire, I was super excited. I’m like, yeah, she’s leaving. It’s totally dead, and she’s gonna break free from this.
Of course, they do a little surprise on you, and she ended up back at the house and succumbed to this sort of demon, so obviously, it seems that Joel, who had witnessed her, is going to perhaps be the star of Smile 2 because Cyrus told me that Smile 2 was a thing which makes me want to watch that now.
I can appreciate that it was different. It wasn’t on either side of the spectrum. You know the supernatural ghost creepy type, or the other side, where it’s an actual monster or person that’s a killer. It was just some sort of weird entity that wasn’t completely obvious what it was to us, so I could appreciate that for sure. It was something different.
I would give it like a 2.5 out of 5. I think that my rating would be so much better if the ending wasn’t what it was, because it felt like she had done such hard work, and I was rooting for her to find a way around to survive without having to die herself or kill someone. Her solution was kind of soiled, and she ended up dying, so that was unfortunate. I also loved her acting as well. I think she did a really good job. Overall, it was an okay movie, I’d say.”
To close, I would say that this movie lost me a bit after I thought about it. There truly is no plot outside of witnessing a suicide, then committing suicide, and so on. The entity that causes this is not explained beyond feeding off of “trauma.”
The mini plotline of the one individual who murdered someone else rather than killing himself is not gone into any further than the scene it appears in. Rose has thoughts of killing someone, but never really goes after it.
Rose also ignores the help that is available to her throughout the movie. Though I realize that she is technically “cursed” and that all previous victims killed themselves within a week, she is offered help by her boss at the hospital at least twice, her fiancé attempts to get her to speak to her therapist, and Joel wants to help her several times. Rose simply runs away from anyone who wants to help her, saying that either nothing is wrong or that she is fine.
I don’t want to continue to dwell on the movie’s bad qualities, as I did enjoy it while watching. I remember the marketing that was going on back when the movie was released, which included having actors and actresses going to sporting events and smiling the entire time. It was pretty wicked and has stuck in my head.
Overall, I would give the movie 2 out of 5 stars. It was a good popcorn flick, and I would watch the sequel.
Jessica’s rating – ⭐⭐ 1/2 / ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Cyrus’ rating – ⭐⭐/⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐