SMILE is a 2022 American psychological horror film written and directed by Parker Finn, about a psychiatrist directing bizarre, very scary, and inexplicable incidents and an alarming and frightening smile. Let’s get to know this movie.
SMILE 2022 Film Story
This film revolves around a psychiatrist called Dr. Rose Cotter, who was traumatized at the age of 10 when she witnessed her mother’s suicide in front of her by taking a drug overdose. Rose received the necessary care to get out of this trauma until she became a psychiatrist working at Mount Pleasant Hospital.
One day she entered Mount Pleasant Hospital, staffed by graduate student Laura Weaver, whose professor Gabriel Munoz witnessed beating himself with a hammer to death just a few days ago, where the student’s psychiatric condition deteriorated after that event and she was haunted by evil entities that no one else could see and she was taken to hospital for treatment.
Dr. Rose did an emergency session with the student and told her that she had hallucinations, but student Laura insisted that the entity had the ability to appear as other people wearing a frightening smile. She also told her that she was about to die and suddenly started a panic gesture appearing on her and then started smiling creepily, cutting her neck with a broken vase in front of Dr. Rose’s eyes.
After the student’s suicide, the police began investigating the case, and one of the detectives interviewing Rose about Laura’s death was her ex-boyfriend Joel, where Rose told him, still affected by the event, about Laura telling her that she had been cursed by an evil entity with a painful smile.
After this traumatic event Rose began to see Laura smiling at her in different places, prompting her to consider Professor Gabriel Munoz’s suicide case where she discovered that Gabriel was also smiling strangely just before his death.
Rose examines her patient Carl Rankin, a former hospital patient with an obsession attack. Carl smiles alarmingly at disaster and begins to threaten Rose and frighten him, leading her to call for security. Security restrains Carl, but it turns out that Rose only imagined his aggressive behavior. Hospital President Dr. Morgan Desai gives Dr. Rose a week’s leave of absence, believing that Laura’s traumatic death may have caused psychological trauma to Dr. Rose.
While Rose is on vacation with her fiancé, a lot of strange things happen to her. While she’s at home alone, Laura once again blows the whistle on the security alert and receives a call that she believes is from the security service, but surprises her with a sarcastic message. Shortly thereafter Rose receives another call but this time from the real operator of the alarm makes her nervous. After her fiance Trevor returns home, Rose notes that her cat is missing.
While she recedes her last recorded meeting with student Laura if she suffers a seizure of extreme panic, which leads her fiancé Trevor to calm her down. Rose is concerned about her mental health, and visits her former doctor Dr. Madeleine Northcott, who helped her out of the trauma of her mother’s suicide before her eyes. Rose tells her she suffers from hallucinations, but Dr. Madeleine is due to her long-term guilt for a deliberate overdose of her mother. Dr. Madeleine denies Rose’s request for an antidepressant prescription.
One day Rose and her fiance Trevor go to her nephew Jackson’s seven-year-old birthday party at Rose’s sister Holly’s house. Guests are scared when Jackson opens Rose’s gift to find her dead cat packed inside. Rose is shocked and screams hard that she’s not responsible for it and that she lost her cat a while ago, but Tra Laura again panics and falls on a glass table.
Rose feels distracted and tries to tell Trevor about Laura’s curse and she thinks she seems to have moved in. But Trevor responds lightly and accuses her of inheriting mental illness from her mother and of having killed their cat.
So Rose decides to save herself from this curse herself. Rose visits Gabriel Munoz’s widow Victoria. Victoria shows shocking sketches of Rose that Gabriel painted for a dark entity that he claimed he was trying to get into. Rose also learns that Gabriel was traumatized by his brother’s death 20 years ago, and that he started screaming about the curse after attending a conference when he saw a woman kill herself. Rose Victoria asked her about that woman’s name, but she kicked Rose out of her house after Rose insisted that Gabriel was telling the truth about his curse.
Rose convinces her ex-boyfriend Joel to help her keep searching to get to the truth. Joel uses his police computer to access Angela Powell’s file, which was the real estate agent Gabriel Munoz saw committing suicide in front of him. Additional video shows that several days before her death, Angela saw a smiling man suddenly kill himself by clipping his neck with gardening scissors at a gas station.
After Rose returned home, she found that her fiancé Trevor called Madeleine to intervene in her anxious mental state, which led her to feel betrayed, and came out to take copies of Joel’s files to her sister Holly. Rose tries to tell her sister Holly about the curse, which only leads to an argument between the sisters about Rose acting similarly to her mother.
Joel contacts Rose to tell her that additional searches revealed a series of 20 similar cases involving witnesses to 19 suicides. The exception was accountant Robert Talley, who watched his business partner commit suicide. Instead of killing himself later, Robert killed a stranger four days later. A week later, an eyewitness committed suicide for Robert’s actions and the similar suicide continued in a series of mysterious events.
Joel decides to take Rose to see Robert Talley in prison, and on the way she tells Rose Joel that she believes the evil entity is confusing people before they kill themselves and that she is concerned that the curse’s time is almost over. When they arrive at the prison, Robert reveals to Rose in particular that the only way to break the chain of curse is to kill someone else, but there must be a witness to that because the evil entity needs to move to someone else’s body to continue to survive. Robert suddenly panics when he realizes that Rose is holding the curse right now.
When Rose returns home, she is surprised by a surprise visit from Madeleine at home, but soon realizes that the evil entity impersonated Madeleine when the real Madeleine calls her on the phone. The entity posing as Madeleine Yala smiles and threatens Rose.
Rose is armed with a kitchen knife to protect herself, and she goes speeding to the hospital. Rose faces a vision of stabbing her patient Carl to death in front of Dr. Desai, who then tears his face. Real Dr. Desai finds Rose in her car with the knife and tries to call for help before she goes away.
Joel calls to tell Rose that APB exists for her based on the meeting with her head at the hospital. Rose vaguely explains that she will confront the evil entity and wants to be alone so that the curse doesn’t pass to someone else.
Rose drives to her abandoned childhood home where her mother died. Inside the house, Rose sees her mother accusing her of letting her die by not seeking help when finding an overdose. Rose accuses her mother of being an abusive monster. Then the vision turns into a slim creature attacking Rose. Rose sets fire to the creature using an oil lantern. Rose then escapes outside where the entire house is on fire.
Rose then goes to Joel to apologize to him for being involved in this situation and not being emotionally present during their relationship, but realizes that she is still cursed when Joel smiles scarily and speeds outside to discover that she has not left her childhood home the same.
The real Joel arrives at the abandoned house, but Rose locks the door on him so he doesn’t get in so as to protect him. As the creature pulls its mouth and crawls inside. Joel breaks into the house in time to see Rose set herself on fire as she smiles alarmingly at another disaster and the curse continues.
SMILE 2022 Movie Review
This film is considered one of the most famous films of the year, due to the very western idea of ​​the film, a disturbing and uncomfortable smile that pushed the level of fear and anxiety among viewers to an extreme level. Although this film is the first film by director Parker Finn, he was able to employ the horror jump scenes very well.
