When the grin is more than a scare
Every audience member got immediately shocked by the first trailer from the moment when a semblance of warmth and civility turned to horrific and monstrous. Smile begins as a supernatural horror movie but quickly pivots to the psychological. The smile is a mask of horror and a symbol of trauma and the facade of normalcy.
Rose Cotter, a character played with great intensity by Sosie Bacon, is the next link in the chain of cursed, traumatized witnesses. Each of the witnesses is doomed to watch a member of their own smile-donning family die. The haunting, ridiculous, and grotesque cognitive dissonance image, as well as the act of horror and trauma, is the smile masquerading violence with the semblance of civility and horror.
Director Parker Finn sought to capture the “wrong in a human way” paradigm. The performers were instructed to maintain a dissociated, lifeless, and blank stare. The ecstatic smile was a horror of cognitive dissonance, joy of the grotesque, and horror of death and trauma. The mask was the smile.
Rose’s spiral: more than a haunted heroine
Rose begins as a therapist — calm, logical, rational. But the moment she witnesses her patient’s horrifying death, her life unravels. The entity haunting her seems to feed on her buried grief and guilt, especially tied to her mother’s suicide. Every hallucination — every familiar face suddenly grinning — chips away at her sanity.
As her world collapses, we see two versions of Rose: the professional healer and the traumatized survivor. Her fiancé and sister dismiss her pleas, her colleagues turn skeptical, and even her ex-boyfriend Joel, a detective, hesitates to believe. The film captures what it feels like to scream for help while everyone thinks you’re crazy.
In the chilling climax, Rose confronts the entity disguised as her mother — a monstrous metaphor for generational trauma. Rose’s guilt over not saving her mother becomes the curse’s power source. When she appears to destroy it, the audience feels a flash of hope — until the illusion fades, revealing that she has succumbed. The curse passes to Joel, showing that trauma, once unleashed, rarely dies with one person.
The curse that isn’t supernatural (or is it?)
One of the most disquieting concepts attributed to Smile is the contagious nature of trauma. What if the emotional pain of one person bleeds into the lives of others, unacknowledged and unaddressed, like an infectious disease? The curse of Rose is at once literal and symbolic. It represents her pain at its most tangible and projection of her torment through outward manifestation.
The film attempts to show the disregard society has for mental illness. Every time Rose attempts to explain her struggles, it is met with patronizing comments or an outright refusal to listen. That isolation, for terror, is profound on its own. The entity, with its devastating presence, thrives, not because it is powerful, but because it is ignored.
The use of color and composition profoundly develops that theme. In scenes depicting panic and violence, red is the dominant hue. It is the color of exposure, pain, and the emotion of rage. Calm, but in an untrustworthy way, blue is often cast over and around Rose, imbuing her with a false sense of safety. Available in the background, green is the duplicitous color of trust which is always present before another deception.
The film’s use of disquieting extremes focuses on reflections and the eyes, consistently and intentionally. Faces are distorted in mirrors, hidden grins are captured by cameras, and eyes freely flow with torment. It is horror by perception, and it attempts to convey that what is viewed means nothing if it is not believed.
Behind the scenes: scars in the making
The trauma motif explored in Parker Finn’s short film Laura Hasn’t Slept inspired the making of Smile. Finn’s original idea for the film was trauma as an inescapable curse. Initially planned for streaming, test audiences responses changed Paramount’s distribution strategy to theater releases. This decision catapulted it into the global phenomenon it is today.
The production was also challenging, as severe weather forced the use of creative lighting for one of the key scenes. The set design for the climax’s house confrontation was made to look as though the hallway was shrinking and distorted, which was an impressive practical effect.
In camera shooting of the static poses ‘smiling faces’ was also emphasized, with hands and feet made for digital cinematography. Finn’s use of practical effects was to prove that real discomfort may be more pronounced, and, to support the idea that real faces, though abnormal, are more disturbing than any imagined digital creature.
Having originally cast the film with the working title Something’s Wrong With Rose, the film was subsequently recast and further tonal rewrites were made to accommodate for Sosie Bacon’s performance, which provided the film with an emotional anchor.
When art mirrors life: actors and their scars
Sosie Bacon’s own career path added an extra layer to her performance. As the daughter of actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, she has spoken about wanting to carve her own identity in the industry. Smile offered her a role that demanded vulnerability — a slow mental breakdown portrayed with both fragility and strength. She once said that the hardest part wasn’t the jump scares, but “staying in that emotional headspace for weeks without turning it off.”
Kyle Gallner, who plays Joel, brought quiet empathy to a character caught between duty and compassion. His calm exterior masks fear — much like Rose’s — making their dynamic both tragic and human.
In the sequel Smile 2, Naomi Scott takes the reins as pop star Skye Riley, another figure battling public perfection and private horror. Scott has spoken about her struggles with anxiety and imposter syndrome, saying that her connection to Skye’s facade made the performance personal.
Actor Lukas Gage revealed that during one particularly intense scene, the realistic gore effects made him physically ill off-camera. Horror, it seems, demands as much endurance as emotion.
Scenes that haunt long after the credits roll
Discussions about the first patient’s suicide remain. Fans describe the patient as calm and smiling prior to the violent outburst. It set a tone for a film in which peace is always a heartbeat away from madness.
Consider the birthday party scene. In the middle of the festivities, a party-goer, Rose’s nephew, is surprised before a gift box containing her dead cat. It is a unique moment of domestic terror worldwide, a horror taking its place in the routine of the day.
And the final scene. Rose is having a delusion of triumph that switches to a horror of despair. This is more than a scare; it’s a tragedy. The monster wins. This is the tragedy of the film, the wound was never healed. Smile 2 continues to have mirror imagery. The reflections we see do not portrait who we are. Rather, they reveal who we are afraid to become.
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