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Smile Cast & Character Guide

Smile 2: release date, cast, story & everything we know, smile: 10 movies & tv shows where you've seen the cast before.

Smile uses horror to explore how trauma destroys lives, leaving an impact long after the movie ends.
The entity in Smile represents emotional pain, forcing victims to confront their fears and inner demons.
The unexpected ending of Smile challenges typical horror tropes, adding depth and elevating the film's impact.

The Smile ending explained that grief and trauma could destroy anyone's life. Written and directed by Parker Finn and based on his short film Laura Hasn't Slept , Smile centers on Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a therapist who begins experiencing hallucinations after witnessing a patient take her own life. The patient, Laura (Caitlin Stacey), saw her professor die by suicide, after which she became the target of a presence with a sinister smile. By the end of the movie, anyone who wanted to see Rose make it out safely ended up sadly disappointed.

Smile leaves the audience wondering if there is any way to stop the terrible curse. Similar to movies like The Ring or It Follows , the Smile entity could almost be seen as fate itself — a harrowing prospect as it continues to move on from victim to victim. However, the true reason Smile is so chilling is its exploration of how trauma and grief can destroy a person from within until all hope is gone. That is why the Smile ending explained that things don't always work out, an idea sticking with viewers long after the last scene played out.

Smile is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, and MGM+

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The modern renaissance of the horror genre has made it possible for at least a dozen movie series to become major franchises in the future.

The Curse In Smile Explained

A mysterious entity passes the smile curse from victim to victim.

The Smile movie explained the effects of trauma through a horror lens, featuring intricate and tragic themes that add real layers to the meaning of the movie. Following Laura's death, Rose starts experiencing visions of her own and begins seeing the smile-themed creature. This strains her relationships with her sister and her fiancé, Trevor ( The Boys ' Jessie T. Usher ), upending her life and giving her a countdown to her seemingly inevitable demise. Looking for answers, the movie sees Rose seek the help of her police officer ex, Joel (Kyle Gallner).

Smile's central creature isn't only meant to frighten, but is a metaphor for emotional pain, delivering poignant messages about the often-inescapable nature of trauma

Together, they discover that Smile-related cases can be traced back to multiple people, none of whom lived more than a week after watching another person die by suicide. Rose realizes the deaths are actually part of a curse, with each person dying in front of a witness and passing the affliction to them. Later in Smile , Joel and Rose eventually come across a prisoner named Robert Talley (Rob Morgan), who reveals that the entity pursuing Rose feeds on trauma. Her situation continues to worsen after that until she is forced to confront the creature on her own.

Smile puts Rose's terrifying experiences into question as her life falls apart. Such structure allows the movie to deliver consistent misdirections, which aid in constructing its unnerving narrative and psychological twists. Smile's central creature isn't only meant to frighten, but is a metaphor for emotional pain, delivering poignant messages about the often-inescapable nature of trauma, exemplified by the fate of Rose, as the Smile ending explained. Smile is a complicated story to unpack, both due to its mental-health subtexts and unexpected closing scenes. Smile has been likened to The Ring , but it offers a very different perspective.

Smile: What Is The Entity & Why Does It Make Its Victims Grin Like That?

The entity's sinister grin in Smile makes it one of the most terrifying demons in horror movie history and arguably also one of the most powerful.

What Happens In The Smile Ending?

Rose passes the curse on to joel.

The Smile movie explained the entity needs another person to witness her death to carry on its curse, Rose secludes herself in her childhood home. There, the entity takes the form of her mother, revealing that, after overdosing, she asked a then 10-year-old Rose to call for help. Rose declined and her mother died.

Rose forgives herself for her inaction in childhood, but that doesn't deter the creature, which transforms into a monstrous version of Rose's mother. She sets the creature on fire and runs out of the house. With the curse seemingly over, she visits Joel in the Smile ending to apologize for pushing him out of her life. In what could be considered one of Smile 's best reveals , however, Joel turns out to be the creature in disguise, revealing that Rose never actually left the house and is instead trapped in her own mind.

The Smile ending closes as the camera focuses on Rose's death being reflected in Joel's terrified eye, showing that her fate will continue to happen to other people.

In the real world, Joel arrives at Rose's childhood home, and when he enters, she turns around with an evil grin on her face. Rose then takes her own life in front of Joel, effectively passing the curse on to him. The Smile ending closes as the camera focuses on Rose's death being reflected in Joel's terrified eyes, showing that her fate will continue to happen to other people.

Here is a guide to the cast and characters in the hit Paramount horror movie Smile, which offers a fresh take on the transferrable curse subgenre.

Why Was The Entity Represented By A Smile?

The nightmarish grins are a metaphor for false optimism in the face of trauma.

The connective thread between all the victims in Smile is the sinister grin they exhibit before their deaths. This is tied to the entity feeding on trauma. As explained by another one of the Smile movie's main characters, Rose's therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott (Robin Weigert), trauma is manageable but doesn't fully go away.

Smile serves as an allegory of emotional suffering being masked by fabricated displays of happiness and optimism.

Smile serves as an allegory of emotional suffering being masked by fabricated displays of happiness and optimism. The victims commit horrific acts with forced smiles on their faces. Their unnerving expression is the entity's twisted way of mocking human response to psychological suffering, and possibly done to further traumatize its victims.

Smile Is An Allegory Of Trauma And Mental Health

The Smile movie explained the metaphor for a person's control over their mind in response to trauma, and the pressure people feel to cover up their struggles with fake happiness. As the creature makes it clear to Rose during the Smile ending, she is a prisoner of her own mind. That's shown throughout the film as she gradually loses her grip on reality, and those close to her attempt to distance themselves from her. It's further evidenced by the fact that, over the course of Smile 's story, the entity seemingly never physically attacks Rose. Instead, it's the various visions it gives her that lead her to hurt herself.

Even when the creature takes the form of Rose's therapist and attacks her, it's left ambiguous whether it actually happened, or if she hallucinated it. The film heavily hints at Rose's predicaments occurring only as a result of something she herself did (due to the entity's hold over her), shown by her experiencing horrific visions in one place and coming to seemingly hours later in another. Much like all the other Smile movie victims, Rose slowly lost authority over her mind and body, becoming increasingly dangerous to both herself and those around her until the moment of her death.

Smile 's central creature is powered by trauma, and its curse's method of transmission hides a poignant message about the effects of emotional suffering.

The victims of the Smile creature lacking complete control over themselves may also explain why they died in no less than a week after being cursed. Though the semi-specific time frame isn't truly explained, it may be connected to the film's emphasis on the importance of mental health, as the victims losing their psychological stability quickly deteriorate, ultimately leading to their deaths. In this, Smile can be seen to reflect how mental health issues are often disregarded as less severe than physical health issues, and can sometimes be unfairly treated as a result.

Smile 's central creature is powered by trauma, and its curse's method of transmission hides a poignant message about the effects of emotional suffering. The Smile curse is quite literally trauma being passed on from one emotionally hurt person to another, as something many victims have in common is witnessing a loved one die. The Smile film depicts emotional distress as a lethal virus, similar in nature to the entity in 2015's It Follows , with individuals transmitting it in one of two ways.

On one hand, there are those who pass it on without realizing it — those who are completely possessed by the entity and are forced to take their own lives in front of a prospective carrier. Then, there are those who knowingly inflict their pain on others in a fruitless effort to rid themselves of their predicament, such as Robert Talley, who murdered someone to free himself from the curse. As such, Smile 's horror entity could be interpreted as the pain and sorrow brought on by handling trauma in unhealthy ways — with the smile itself then being an emblem of this.

How Will The Smile Sequel Build On The Ending?

Smile 2 is currently in development.

Smile 2 has been confirmed with an October 2024 release date. However, one element that's not been revealed is how the Smile sequel will build on the unforgettable ending of the original. The Smile ending explained that the entity continues its insidious crusade, specifically through Joel. Thus, the movie's mythology is well-suited for a continuation. However, Smile 2 may not necessarily directly follow the ending of the original . As writer-director Parker Finn explained to Polygon :

"I wanted the movie to really exist for its own sake. I wanted to tell this character's story. That was what was really important to me. I think there's a lot of fun to be had in the world of Smile. But certainly, as a filmmaker, I never want to retread anything I've already done. So, if there was ever to be more of Smile , I'd want to make sure it was something unexpected, and different than what Smile is."

Even if the sequel doesn't take the follow-up approach by continuing from the Smile ending with Joel, there's still potential for a unique horror movie franchise. Smile presents a fascinating and terrifying concept, and continuing its mythology certainly has mileage to be explored further. The curse is an ever-present issue that could be found anywhere at any point in time, which perfectly positions this world for future chapters.

Smile 2 has been confirmed by Paramount and due in 2024 - here's everything we know about what's next when The Smile Entity returns to theaters.

How Sosie Bacon Explains The Smile Ending

The smile actress knew rose couldn't commit murder, even to save her own life.

Sosie Bacon knew going into Smile that she would not be the Final Girl, as the Smile movie ending explained that there was no way she could escape the curse without murder. However, Bacon stated she was glad the movie didn't have a happy ending (via THR ). When talking about Rose's final decision being death by suicide or killing someone else to survive, she admitted that she doesn't personally like to think about it. However, she points out that the Smile movie explained that Rose would not have been happy if she killed anyone.

"It’s just so sad for her. She went into the house knowing that she would either get eaten by the monster or that she would burn the house down, if she could. But at least she wasn’t going to pass [the curse] on, which was the idea. So that was her value, and I was more sad for her that she didn’t get either of those things. But I think I would’ve been more bummed out if this movie had a happy ending."

New horror movie Smile is set to release September 30th, and features many familiar faces, including Sosie Bacon and Kyle Gallner.

The Smile Ending Makes It Special

The final twist in smile elevated the 2022 horror.

The Smile ending explained that trauma can really define a person, and the way this movie ended really helped elevate it from a basic horror film into something special with a message behind its scares. Having a surprise twist ending is a staple of horror movies, but it doesn't always work.

In some cases, it is a gimmick, such as the shocking arrival of Jason at the end of the first Friday the 13th movie. However, other times it turns everything in the movie on its head. When done right, it can turn a good movie into a great one. The Smile ending twist works in the same way that the ending of Descent made it an even better horror movie.

When it comes to The Descent , the better ending was the alternate ending shown in the UK. In that ending, Sarah thinks she escaped the mutated creatures. However, she never escaped and viewers saw she was still in the caverns, never escaping her fate. Her mind shut down and gave her a false happy ending.

This is also why the Smile ending was so impactful, as it made the audience believe Rose had won, only to pull back the curtains and reveal she never escaped and was doomed. That false sense of security made Smile one of the better horror movies of 2022.

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A psychological horror film written and directed by newcomer Parker Finn, Smile is the story of a woman who, after witnessing a traumatic incident involving a patient, terrifying incidents keep occurring in her life. Sosie Bacon stars as Dr. Rose Cotter, the woman afflicted by these new realistic nightmares. The horrifying occurrences happen so frequently that Rose realizes she'll have to confront past trauma to escape this new reality and survive the supernatural forces trying to kill her.

Smile (2022)

Entertainment
Breaking Down the End of <i>Smile</i>

Breaking Down the End of Smile

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Smile

With a tagline like, “Once you see it, it’s too late,” it’s perhaps not shocking to hear that Smile doesn’t have a happy ending—but the film’s writer and director Parker Finn hopes it’s a poignant one.

The horror movie , in theaters now, follows clinical psychologist Dr. Rose Cotter (played by Sosie Bacon ) as she tries to escape a smirking evil entity that is out to kill her. The horrifying presence attaches itself to Rose after she sees Laura (Caitlin Stasey), a patient with no history of mental illness, take her own life. Laura, who, just days earlier, was witness to a gruesome suicide, hurts herself while creepily grinning from ear to ear, making it all the more unsettling.

Rose soon begins to see Laura everywhere she goes, wearing that same teeth-baring smile that the college student had said was haunting her in the moments right before her death. Eventually, the grinning demon begins to take on the form of other people Rose knows including her therapist, in one of the more off putting scenes in the film. Those closest to Rose believe she’s lost her mind and that her hallucinations are a symptom of some undiagnosed mental illness. (Rose’s mom, we learn, took her own life when she was just a kid, and she has not yet processed it fully.) But Rose knows there is an explanation for what’s happening to her, even if it sounds a little far fetched.

What happens in Smile ?

Desperate to figure things out, Rose seeks out her ex-boyfriend, police officer Joel (Kyle Gallner), who is the only one willing to really listen to her. With his help, she discovers that the phantom stalking her feeds off of a person’s trauma. Before attaching itself to Rose, the demon affixed itself to 20 other people. Nineteen of those people took their own life within four to seven days after witnessing someone else die by suicide. In hopes of learning how she can save herself, she visits Robert Talley (Rob Morgan), the only person who has managed to stay alive after encountering the grinning demon. His secret? He killed his neighbor in order to stop the chain and is now serving a life sentence. Robert saved himself from certain death, but he didn’t stop the demon. He just passed the buck to some other innocent person who then in turn passed it on to someone else with no real hope of it ever stopping.

Committing murder isn’t a viable solution for Rose. It’s merely a Band-Aid for a much deeper wound. She wants to stop this specter in its tracks without hurting someone else in the process. Realizing that this evil needs a witness to continue its path of deadly destruction, Rose concludes that if she dies and no one is around to see it—and become traumatized—she could, in theory, permanently end this killing spree.

Read More: How Smile Pays Tribute to Horror Classics Like The Ring and Rosemary’s Baby

Five days after witnessing Laura’s death, Rose heads to her childhood home, a decrepit cabin in the woods where her mom died by suicide. The movie often flashes on the horrific scene of Rose opening the door to her mother’s bedroom to find her lifeless body. She has not forgiven herself for the events of that day. Instead of dealing with the trauma, she’s gotten good at numbing the pain with nonstop work or white wine.

It might be why, on the first night at the cabin, the demon comes to her in the form of her mother. She apologizes to Rose for what she had done to herself, but also asks, “Why did you let me die?” In the film’s final act, it’s revealed that Rose’s mom had asked for help in the final moments of her life, pleading with Rose to call the police because “mommy made a mistake.” Rose admits that she didn’t take action because she was scared of her mom, who had a history of hurting herself.

Rose is able to find a bit of closure in this conversation that allows her to come clean to this version of her mom. Opening up gives Rose the strength to take down this terrifying chameleonic presence that has been feeding off her trauma. She burns the demon and the cabin to the ground, but not before the evil thing reveals that these hallucinations are all a product of her own mind. “This is not real,” it tells her. “Your mind makes it real.” And unfortunately, we can’t escape our mind.

How does Smile end?

Those words soon come back to haunt Rose, who, after killing the demon, heads to Joel’s apartment where she comes clean to him, apologizing for putting up barriers. It’s a sweet moment, the first time we’ve seen Rose be vulnerable with someone else. More importantly, she’s finally being honest with herself about the burden she’s been carrying around since her mom’s death. It feels like a real breakthrough for Rose, who might finally be on the long road to recovery. But when the camera flashes back to Joel a creepy smile appears on his face.

Rose didn’t slay the demon—she only thought that she did. She’s still at the cabin, but she’s not alone. Joel has shown up there in hopes of saving her from herself. She knows that if she doesn’t do something quick Joel will be the demon’s next victim. When she goes back inside the house she immediately finds herself face-to-face with the demon now the size of a giant. This time, it takes hold of her, ripping off its face to reveal a Russian nesting doll of mouths that manage to swallow her up whole.

Moments later, when Joel enters the cabin, he finds Rose standing with her back to him. As she slowly turns towards the camera, she’s wearing a maniacal grin while holding a gas can above her head. She pours it on herself and lights a match. After spending our time seeing things from Rose’s perspective, often in uncomfortably closeup shots, we see her final moments through Joel’s eyes, who can’t look away despite his horror. The curse has now been passed on to him.

Read more: 21 Underrated Horror Movies You Probably Haven’t Seen and Can Stream Right Now

Smile director Parker Finn knows that some will be upset by the “bummer” ending, but hopes it will offer the audience an “emotional catharsis,” he says. “It’s scary to be a person walking around in the world and I wanted the ending to reflect that in a way that felt earned.”

For most of the movie, Rose is left to face this demon on her own, but it’s clear she’s been forced to deal with her demons all by herself for years. The stigma that can come with mental illness has taught Rose to smile through her grief so as not to make others uncomfortable. But it’s just a mask that hides the reality of the depths of her pain. In the end, Rose might have been able to fool everybody else, but she can’t trick her mind into believing she’s fully dealt with the effects of her prior trauma.

Finn leaves the question of whether or not Rose is being haunted by an actual supernatural being or if it’s just her own ghosts returning up to the viewer. For him, the movie is more of a “meditation” on trauma and its rippling effects rather than a definitive commentary on such a complicated subject. He just wanted Rose’s journey to feel honest, even if it’s painful to watch.

“It’d be too easy to be like, ‘I confronted it and now everything is fine and happy.’ I don’t think that’s reflective of real life,” he says of the film’s final fake out. “I think those kinds of things are pernicious. They linger, they don’t let go. They creep back, whether we want them to or not.”

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When the horror histories of the 2010s are written, the decade will be associated with trauma metaphors the way the ‘80s are with slasher movies. And although it comes on the cusp of a new decade, the new Paramount wide-release horror movie "Smile" fits right in with its PTSD-induced kin. The difference here is that the monster is barely a metaphor at all: The demon, or evil spirit, or whatever it is—the movie is vague on this point—literally feeds on, and is spread by, trauma.

Specifically, the vague something that dogs Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ) throughout “Smile” likes the taste of people who have witnessed someone else dying by suicide—gruesome, painful, bloody suicide, by garden shears and oncoming trains and the shattered fragments of a ceramic vase in a hospital intake room. That’s where Rose briefly meets Laura ( Caitlin Stasey ), a PhD student who’s brought to the psychiatric emergency ward where Rose works, shaking and terrified that something is out to get her. “It looks like people, but it’s not a person,” Laura explains, saying that this thing has been following her ever since she witnessed one of her professors bludgeoning himself to death with a hammer four days earlier. At the end of the extended dialogue scene that opens the film, Laura turns to Rose with a psychotic grin on her face and proceeds to slit her own throat.

This would unsettle anyone, but it especially bothers Rose given that Rose’s own mother died by suicide many years earlier. That lingering trauma, and the fears and stigma that surround it, form the film’s most intelligent thematic thread: Rose’s fiance Trevor ( Jessie T. Usher ) admits that he’s researched inherited mental illness online, and harsh terms like “nutjobs,” “crazies,” and “head cases” are used to describe mentally ill people throughout the film. The idea that she might not actually be plagued by the same entity that killed Laura, and that her hallucinations, lost time, and emotional volatility might have an internal cause, seems to bother Rose more than the concept of being cursed. The people around Rose, including Trevor, her therapist Dr. Northcott ( Robin Weigert ), her boss Dr. Desai ( Kal Penn ), and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinzer), certainly seem to think the problem is more neurochemical than supernatural—that is, until it’s way too late.

The only one who believes Rose is her ex, Joel ( Kyle Gallner ), a cop who’s been assigned to Laura’s case. Their tentative reunion opens the door to the film’s mystery element, which makes up much of “Smile’s” long, but not overly long, 115-minute run time. The film’s storyline follows many of your typical beats of a supernatural horror-mystery, escalating from a quick Google (the internet-age equivalent of a good old-fashioned library scene) to an in-person interview with a traumatized, incarcerated survivor of whatever this malevolent entity actually is. Brief reference is made to a cluster of similar events in Brazil, opening up the door to a sequel.

“Smile’s” greatest asset is its relentless, oppressive grimness: This is a film where children and pets are as vulnerable as adults, and the horror elements are bloody and disturbing to match the dark themes. This unsparing sensibility is enhanced by Bacon’s shaky, vulnerable performance as Rose: At one point, she screams at Trevor, “I am not crazy!,” then mumbles an apology and looks down at her shoes in shame. At another, her wan smile at her nephew’s birthday party stands as both a bleak counterpoint to the sick grin the entity’s victims see before they die (thus the film’s title), as well as a relatable moment for viewers who have reluctantly muddled their way through similar gatherings in the midst of a depressive episode.

Sadly, despite a compelling lead and strong craft behind the camera—the color palette, in shades of lavender, pink, teal, and gray, is capably chosen and very of the moment—“Smile” is diminished by the sheer fact that it’s not as fresh a concept as it might seem. This is director Parker Finn ’s debut feature as a writer and director, based on a short film that won a jury award at SXSW 2020. To spin that into a non-franchise wide-release movie from a major studio like Paramount within two years—in a pandemic, no less!—is an impressive achievement, to be sure.

But in padding out the concept from an 11-minute short into a nearly two-hour movie, “Smile” leans too heavily not only on formulaic mystery plotting, but also on horror themes and imagery lifted from popular hits like “ The Ring ” and “ It Follows .” David Robert Mitchell ’s 2014 film is an especially prominent, let’s say, influence on “Smile,” which, combined with its placement on the “it’s really about trauma” continuum, make this a less bracing movie experience than it might have been had it broken the mold more aggressively. It does introduce Finn as a capable horror helmer, one with a talent for an elegantly crafted jump scare and a knack for making a viewer feel uneasy and upset as they exit the theater—both advantages for a film like this one. But fans excited to see an “original” horror film hitting theaters should temper those expectations.

This review was filed from the premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 23rd. It opens on September 30th.

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and critic based in Chicago with a speciality in genre cinema. She worked as the News Editor of The A.V. Club from 2014-2019, and as Senior Editor of that site from 2019-2022. She currently writes about film for outlets like Vulture, Rolling Stone, Indiewire, Polygon , and RogerEbert.com.

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Film Credits

Smile (2023)

Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language.

115 minutes

Sosie Bacon as Dr. Rose Cotter

Kyle Gallner as Joel

Caitlin Stasey as Laura Weaver

Jessie T. Usher as Trevor

Rob Morgan as Robert Talley

Kal Penn as Dr. Morgan Desai

Robin Weigert as Dr. Madeline Northcott

Parker Finn

Cinematographer

Charlie Sarroff
Elliot Greenberg
Cristobal Tapia de Veer

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Smile Ending Explained: The Painful Truth Behind The Grin

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the film "Smile."

Incredibly, "Smile" now boasts the best second week hold ever for a horror film, dropping only 22% to win the weekend. The runaway success of "Smile" is due largely in part to a high-concept premise that manages to stick the landing during its fiery finale. Even if the jump scares don't always deliver, some of the themes surrounding trauma are compelling enough to show that there is definitely something a little deeper happening behind that scary grin. That may be one of the reasons audiences keep heading back to theaters to see the first big genre movie of the Halloween season.

"Smile" was originally inspired by Parker Finn's award-winning short film, "Laura Hasn't Slept," and the backbone of the main story is sill intact. In the short, a young, petrified woman turns to her therapist to help her get past a frightening, recurring nightmare. In "Smile," Rose (Sosie Bacon) is a hospital psychologist who seeks the help of her therapist (Robin Weigert) after witnessing a patient taking her own life. Rose finds herself in a waking nightmare of sorts when the demon inside her patient transfers to her. From there, everyone close to her dismisses her delusions and refuses to believe her life may be in danger. Rose's former cop boyfriend, Joel (Kyle Gallner), is the only one willing to help uncover the truth.

Rose's predicament spirals out of control, hurling her towards a confrontation with her troubled past during the film's finale. This setup provides a fairly effective means of exploring themes of isolation and mental illness where the demon becomes a metaphor for trauma.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Gathering clues

The horror movie "Smile" centers on a supernatural mystery. After witnessing her patient's tragic suicide, Rose discovers that there are others who suffered the same fate. She has the brilliant idea to track down everyone affected by a trail of suicides. With Joel's help, they gather clues in hopes of finding some answers. Their impromptu investigation takes them on a road trip that does wind up unearthing one important detail: Remember, Rose and Joel pay a visit to a prison inmate named Robert Talley, who has managed to stay alive by killing a perfect stranger to fend off the curse. That's not an option for Rose who assumes that if she kills herself with no witnesses present, she can stop the curse in its tracks.

Rose's theory leads her into the final act of the film where she isolates herself inside her derelict family home. Unknowingly, the location Rose has chosen winds up being the very place where her unresolved childhood trauma originated. She has never dealt with her mother's death from a drug overdose, and the demon uses her guilt to finally take control and fully possess Rose. In the chilling final moments, Rose sets herself on fire inside the cabin as Joel watches on in horror — passing the curse to the one person who believed in her.

The doctor becomes the patient

The monster in "Smile" represents different things at different times. Before Rose is forced to face her past issues, her greatest fear is the feeling that she is losing control of reality and may be going insane. Where she was once the capable psychologist helping those in need, now, she's the one who needs help. Early on, the visions of people smiling at her begin to drive her mad and the monster becomes a stand in for the first signs of mental illness.

Rose battles that demon by convincing herself that what she is seeing is real and she is still of sound mind. However, she's already being ostracized by those closest to her and has to realize the horrible reality that she must face this torment alone. Here, the fear of isolation and abandonment come into play, forcing Rose to confront the mother-daughter issues that are at the heart of the film. There's obviously a reason why the smile demon appears as a giant, looming depiction of Rose's Mom during the final act.

One of the most unsettling moments in "Smile" takes place just before that when Rose's trusted therapist, Dr. Northcott (Robin Weigert) reveals herself to be the demon. Her own therapist attacks her and shatters the sacred trust between doctor and patient — it's a shocking moment that represents the ultimate betrayal. Ironically, this helps Rose realize that she may have betrayed her own mother in her darkest time of need. Now, the demon takes its final form and becomes a metaphor for guilt and grief.

Hell is other people

The real horror of "Smile" isn't necessarily the internal agony that Rose is experiencing: it's the dismissive way she is treated by the people around her. Rose's therapist, her fiancé Trevor, her sister Holly, and her colleagues treat her like a pariah when her mental state starts to deteriorate. They push her away, which leads to more severe hallucinations and mental anguish. This is not only a commentary on our collective sense of denial when it comes to dealing with trauma, it also shows how we generally want to get as far away from that pain as possible. The farther we are from it, the safer we are.

In "Smile," any character who gets too close to someone possessed by the demon suffers the consequences. People around the victims, including those closest to Rose, seem to innately understand this. What they don't seem to grasp is just how damaging it is to abandon a loved one in a time of need. The forced isolation only exacerbates Rose's symptoms, causing her to fall even further into a state of mental anguish. Her lack of options ties in directly to her decision to isolate herself in the family cabin during the climax.

Truthfully, if she had a better support group around her, "Smile" might have ended up being a very different horror movie. But at least she would have had a few more options instead of the choice she makes that leads to her ghastly death.

What's really behind that smirk

There are two graphic and wonderfully gnarly face-ripping scenes that are really memorable and effective. The first occurs when Rose's colleague Morgan (Kal Penn) suddenly tears the skin off his face just after Rose envisions murdering another patient. Apparently, Rose imagined the whole thing. Then, in the very last sequence, the demon removes its face to reveal its true appearance — a pale, lifeless entity with a seemingly endless grin. When the creature literally crawls inside Rose and completely takes her over, we're led to believe that this may have actually happened. At the very least, it's real for Rose. For conversation's sake, everything is left ambiguous for the audience to contemplate.

"Smile" tries to be a graphic horror movie and a brooding commentary about trauma, simultaneously. That's commendable, but the jump scares sometimes undermine the film's most important message: We hide real trauma behind a make-believe exterior. The delusions and visions Rose experienced led her to a literal place that allowed her to deal with her family trauma and truly accept her fate. The smile isn't real, it's a disguise that hides the pain underneath. That's why the smile scenes are so eerily effective — because they look so out of place. Ultimately, the wide grin in "Smile" represents the hallucinations Rose experiences that aren't actually real. But those jarring visions help her discover what's really hurting her behind the facade.

In a remarkable turn, going through this horrific journey led to an opportunity to truly heal and grow as a person. With that in mind, it's possible that the mass delusion inside the cabin when Rose sets fire to the demon and escapes shows that she's finally at peace with the sins of the past. She's finally cured, making her suicide all the more tragic.

Maybe a sequel starring Kyle Gallner will help answer some of these open-ended questions. But where's the fun in that?

"Smile" is currently in theaters.

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Let’s Talk About the Ending(s) of Smile

Smile ’s greatest asset is its cruelty. Throughout the film, an unseen entity has tightened its grip on Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), turning her into a fractured, fragile mess. She insists that — among other things — she didn’t kill her cat and wrap it up as a birthday present for her nephew. She bought him a very nice model train, actually! It was the thing that pulled the traumatizing switcheroo. No one in Rose’s family believes her, which is harrowing not only for her but also her sister, Holly (Gillian Zinser). Their mother also had problems, you see — problems that led to Mom’s death by suicide when Rose was just 10 years old.

For Rose, it’s difficult to say which is worse. It’s bad enough that this evil spirit is mimicking the symptoms of a psychotic break in order to, in essence, season its food (the creature feeds on trauma, so making the situation as upsetting as possible for all involved presumably makes its meal tastier). But her worst fear isn’t being possessed by a demon; it’s that her mother’s mental illness was both inheritable and inescapable and that that early trauma will determine her destiny forever.

Rose is a classic trauma-plot protagonist — we really don’t know much about her except that she has suffered and that that suffering has shaped everything about her. She likely became a psychologist to expel some of her guilt and to help others in ways she was not able to help her mother. The trauma of her mother’s illness and death also affects the major relationships in her life, both with Holly and with her fiancé, Trevor (Jessie T. Usher), who was looking at Rose with skepticism long before her strange behavior began.

She’s the type of character Parul Sehgal wrote about earlier this year in her New Yorke r essay “ The Case Against the Trauma Plot ,” one whose buried pain “trumps all other identities, evacuates personality, remakes it in its own image.” What’s interesting about Smile is that its monster does the exact same thing, literally feeding on trauma. Smile is both an extension and a repudiation of the trauma plot, incorporating its traits and tropes while denying viewers the familiar catharsis of conquering the monster.

One of the more famous “It’s really about …” horror films of the past decade, The Babadook, ends with the protagonist and her young son taming the metaphorical manifestation of their trauma (in this case, grief), chaining it up safely in their basement so they can go on with their lives. It’s a tidy visual metaphor for the kind of processing one does in therapy, unearthing and confronting one’s demons in order to lessen their power over you. Smile has its heroine undergo this same process but with different results.

Throughout the movie, vague references are made to the family home, which has been abandoned for years but which Rose refuses to sell. How metaphorical! Rose isn’t ready to face her trauma just yet, so she’s also afraid to return to, or engage with, the site where she suffered. Makes sense, right? But the creature has forced her to go back to this very evocative abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, where the peeling wallpaper and rotting drywall stand in for Rose’s decaying psyche and the memories reemerge like so many jump scares.

Up to this point, Smile has revealed that Rose’s mother died by suicide and that Rose found the body. (Holly, the elder sibling, had already moved out.) But once she reenters the house and walks down a dark, damp hallway to her mom’s old room, we find out the other half of the story. As it turns out, Rose’s mother was still alive when Rose found her sedated and drooling on her stained mattress, and Mom (Dora Kiss) begged Rose to call an ambulance. It’s not clear, even given this context, if Mom’s death was an accidental overdose or a deliberate one, done in hopes that Rose would find her and save her at the last minute. Either way, Rose ignores her, closes the door, and walks away.

If this was an intentional cry for help, it was unfair for Mom to put the burden of saving her life on a 10-year-old child. In the flashback, young Rose is confused and scared. And she really shouldn’t blame herself as an adult for the actions of her guardian. Regardless, Rose has blamed herself ever since, putting her panic of being “like her mother,” and her career choice, into a new light. Rose was not randomly chosen by the hungry entity. This cycle of guilt and fear started a long time ago. She’s been a walking feast for most of her life.

Then Rose does something she has probably done in therapy a million times: She confronts her mother’s ghost, forgiving her younger self in the process. She turns and walks out of the room, but the monster follows her, morphing into a tall, pale, thin creature that fills the doorframe behind her. Save for the decaying house and the creature’s inhuman face — it looks like an alien monster wearing human skin more than anything — it’s almost an exact replica of the scariest moment from It Follows , in which a giant man appears in a bedroom doorway, terrifying the protagonist.

There are more similarities to David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 indie horror hit throughout Smile : The spirit, which one character says “looks like people but isn’t a person,” behaves and manifests itself a lot like Mitchell’s unnamed threat did, appearing in the background of wide shots and approaching characters with a dreamlike sense of inevitability. And as with It Follows, the only way to get rid of the creepy grinning thing that stalks you until it’s time to die, five to seven days after its initial appearance (this part echoes The Ring ), is to pass its curse on to someone else.

Rose is trying to break this cycle, much like we break cycles of trauma and abuse in therapy. And if your trauma monster is literal, like Rose’s is, soaking its lair in kerosene and setting it on fire is an acceptable substitution for writing a letter to your younger self. That’s what she does, turning around and walking away from the house, as first the curtains, then the whole place, go up in flames. Rose is relieved and cleansed. She’s done it. She confronted her past — and conquered it. Unlike the characters in The Babadook, this trauma will not be with her for the rest of her life. She wins. She is free.

Triumphant in her healthy-for-a-horror-movie coping skills, Rose drives back to the city to the apartment where her ex, Joel (Kyle Gallner), the one person who has believed her this entire time, lives. There, she apologizes for pushing him away during their relationship, explaining that she has built walls around her emotions (because of the trauma, naturally), and his ability to breach them scared her so much that she ran away. But she’s not going to run anymore. She’s dealt with her trauma and is ready to start over, happy and healthy for the first time.

What happens next is the cruelest moment in the film. No, confronting your past and coming to terms with it is not enough. Rose wakes up back in the house and realizes she never left. The figure she thought was Joel was actually the entity, masquerading as the one person Rose can trust. It has trapped her in a fantasy of catharsis that cannot actually come true. This was simply her most intense hallucination yet, another instance of lost time, like those that have occurred throughout the film. The one comfort is that she now knows for certain she’s not crazy; the monster is real, and it’s standing right in front of her.

It’s got a similarly fleshy, mindless feel as the pathetic-yet-terrifying Green Man at the end of Alex Garland’s Men . But instead of transforming into a roiling ball of flesh, it rips its face off to reveal multiple grinning jaws, like the mouths of some esoteric deep-sea creature, made of raw, shiny prosthetic musculature. (The monster effects in Smile were all achieved practically, albeit gussied up with some supplementary CGI.) The creature unhinges Rose’s jaw and mashes itself down her throat, a reversal of Men ’s monstrous birth.

Then Joel returns to save the day. But his good intentions are also worthless, as he arrives just in time to see Rose, now fully possessed, drench herself in kerosene and light herself on fire. The final image of the film is Rose’s burning body reflected in the iris of Joel’s eye, burning itself onto his psyche forever. Even though Rose did everything she was supposed to do — that we’re supposed to do to process our own trauma — the monster still won. The cycle will continue.

Smile writer-director Parker Finn characterizes the two endings of his film as an attempt to get ahead of audiences’ expectations. In an interview with Polygon , he said that “horror audiences have gotten so savvy … I tried to subvert that and do something that might catch them off guard.” This speaks to Smile’ s repudiation-through-denial of its trauma plot; Finn coyly adds that Rose is an unreliable narrator and that “it doesn’t matter if [what happens] is real or not,” sidestepping attempts to fix a firm metaphorical meaning on the ending of his film.

It says a lot about the ubiquity of the “ It’s really about trauma ” trope that Finn links audiences’ expectations to the resolution of trauma at the end of a horror movie. What we want is to be reassured that monsters, external or internal, are beatable. We want to believe that the therapy jargon we pick up from pop culture and social media (not to mention our actual therapists) works as a sort of magic spell to banish our demons. Whether it’s doing so deliberately or not, Smile argues that it’s not actually that simple.

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Smile Ending Explained: What Was Behind Those Deadly Grins?

We're grinning with fear.

Robin Weigert as Dr. Madeline Northcott doing creepy smile in Smile 2022 movie

All the SPOILERS are ahead for Smile , now playing in theaters. Put on a happy face and go see the horror movie before reading on.

As we now sit firmly in horror season, it’s about time we got really shaken up by a 2022 movie release , isn’t it? And hey, there’s been a lot of great offerings from the genre already, but none until now that might actually ruin smiles for us, at least for a little while. Now that we’ve seen the horrors that can lie behind a grin, we have to talk about that spine-chilling Smile ending.

Smile follows Sosie Bacon’s Dr. Rose Cotter -- a performance that has been praised by none-other than Stephen King -- as a psychiatrist working in a hospital who sees a patient who at first begins rambling about these dark things she’s been experiencing before spontaneously screaming and then suddenly, finding a massive grin on her face and keeping that frown upside down as she kills herself with a broken piece of a vase right in front of Rose. Following the incident, Rose begins becoming haunted by the same thing the woman warned her about just before her death. Now, to get into what is behind those deadly grins and whether she avoids the same fate.

Caitlin Stasey as Laura Weaver smile death Smile 2022 movie

What Was Behind Those Smiles?

Through Rose’s desperate investigation of the smiles that terrorize her, we learn that she is part of a long running chain of incidents involving a person killing themselves in front of another person while grinning before the witness then goes on to kill themselves in front of someone else. Through her investigation with Kyle Gallner’s Joel, they find this chain of events, which has continued to occur within a week of the previous person. They also find that there’s been one instance of a person surviving the smile by killing someone else in front of someone and the smile haunting transferring through those means.

While it’s never completely explained who exactly the villain is, it seems to be an incredibly powerful evil entity, like a demon of some sort, who feeds on the trauma of others. Once it transfers itself to a person, it can go inside their head and dig out the person’s deepest fears and agonies and use them to haunt the person into a state of absolute horror, leading themselves to ultimately give in to them, where the evil entity then fully takes over and kills them -- the big smile on their face marking its victory over them -- and taking their life.

Sosie Bacon as Rose Cotter in Smile ending

What Happened At The End Of Smile

In the week that Rose becomes haunted by the smile, her fiancé Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) becomes concerned with her behavior and their relationship quickly goes on the rocks. Additionally, her sister distances herself from Rose when the demon makes her kill her cat Mustache and wraps it in the present for her nephew (her sister’s son), which he frightfully unwraps during his birthday party. Additionally, Rose brings up concern from her boss ( Kal Penn ) when she calls doctors on one of her patients on her first day back when she sees him “smiling,” and is commanded to take a short leave. In other words, the evil entity cuts Rose off from her entire life and support system. He even haunts her by embodying her therapist as well.

With her life in ruins, all that’s left is her ex-boyfriend and cop Joel -- who becomes the only one who believes her -- and the string of suicides she is now linked to. Joel helps her locate the only man who survived the smile, through murdering someone and being sent to prison. During their visit, the inmate becomes intensely frightened by the possibility of the entity coming back to him and insists killing someone else is her only option. Instead of waiting for her to find the same fate as the others, or resorting to killing someone, Rose decides there’s one way she might be able to stop the chain of deaths.

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Rose goes away to her abandoned childhood home where her own mother died in her bedroom, in an implied drug overdose that a young Rose was present for, but was too frightened to act on her cries for help in her last moments. The childhood trauma led Rose to become a psychiatrist to help other people with mental health struggles she feels she can save after she felt helpless to assist her mother as a kid. Rose’s plan is that if no one else is around, then the evil entity can not continue its trend of killing people and moving over to new bodies.

When Rose locks herself in her childhood home alone, it’s not long before the evil being reveals itself in a bigger way, soon after playing more mind tricks by appearing to bring to life her late mother in the same clothes and place where she died in front of her. The smile monster uses Rose’s mind and imagination to haunt her further, also bringing her to imagine going back to Joel’s home where she confesses why she was afraid of their relationship and ultimately things ended between them. Joel dons the creepy smile too before Rose finds herself still in the same house.

The creature unveils itself as an incredibly disturbing demonic being that tells her that her life’s traumas are “so inviting” to it. It then begins to merge with Rose through her mouth as we catch up with Joel, who finds Rose’s location and enters the house. When he gets there, he finds Rose burning herself alive whilst grinning. As we see the fire blaze through Joel’s eyes, we can surmise that the chain of deaths will unfortunately continue past Rose.

Sosie Bacon in horror in Smile movie 2022 ending

The Deeper Meaning Behind Smile

Aside from being a really effective horror movie visually and story-wise, Smile ’s concept and ending overall also can speak to a larger meaning regarding the cycles of mental health struggles that continue to emerge and reemerge in society, especially as we hide our inner turmoils with fake smiles. In my own reading of the film, Rose’s decision to go back to her childhood home and break the cycle was in an effort to face her childhood trauma head on rather than leave it boiled up in her. She literally faced her inner demons, however in this instance it got the best of her and she was a bit too late. In my opinion, the Smile ending is a heartbreaking reminder that one person facing their demons does not break a larger cycle within society of masking our real emotions and ignoring the larger societal issues that help create them, but remain hidden from our view. When I spoke to writer/director Parker Finn about this aspect of the movie, here’s what he told CinemaBlend:

I was really interested in kind of investigating the sort of the stuff that we're all carrying around inside of our heads. Whether it's our fears, anxieties, traumas and what we do to try to mask that from the world. And then at the same time I wanted to explore and really place the audience in the shoes of a character who feels like their mind is turning against them and what that might be like to experience and sort of present that in a way that audiences may not have thought of before. And I really wanted to do something so like internal and psychological, but also bring in these external extraordinary elements and kind of weave them together till they're indistinguishable.

We’ll leave you with that. Smile has been rightfully been met with positive reviews overall from critics , including through CinemaBlend’s own 4 out of 5 star review of Smile . With horror season in full swing, check out what other upcoming horror movies are creeping up next.

Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.

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‘Smile’ Ending Explained: Put on a Happy Face

With commentary from director Parker Finn and star Sosie Bacon

“Smile” is ready to give you the willies.

The new original horror film, from first-time writer/director Parker Finn, is here just in time for spooky season and it doesn’t disappoint – this thing is scary, disturbing and, yes, downright haunting. It follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), whose patient kills herself in front of Rose while wearing a ghastly smile on her face. This sends Rose on a quest to discover the truth behind the young woman’s suicide, partnering with a local cop (and former love interest) named Joel (Kyle Gallner). Together, they uncover a series of similar slayings that are all connected by a single thing: that creepy smile.

But how does this showdown between good and unknowable evil ultimately resolve itself?

Well, read on to find out!

Major spoilers follow for “Smile.” If you haven’t watched the movie yet, turn back down. Come back after you’ve watched, though! We’ll still be here!

What’s the deal with the smile?

“Smile” is, mercifully, free of cluttered backstory and cumbersome mythology; the kind of thing that usually makes more straightforward horror movies stumble. Basically this is what we know: the smile is an indication that you have been taken over by some demonic entity. It can appear in your life as someone you know or a complete stranger (shades of “It Follows”). But once it infects you, you’re cursed, more or less. You have between four days and a week, before you’re totally consumed and will end up killing yourself. You have to do it in front of somebody else, so that the curse (and the accompanying demon) can be passed along to some other unlucky son-of-a-gun.

Is there any way to break the curse?

There is! Along the course of their investigation, Rose and Joel discover a loophole: there was a man who witnessed one of these smile suicides and lived to tell the tale. How did he do it? He murdered someone else . Sure, he might be rotting away in a prison sale for the rest of his life. But at least he has a rest of his life .

How does Rose attempt to free herself?

She thinks about how to free herself, including killing one of her more obnoxious patients. But she realizes that the curse will just continue to spread to whoever watches her murder him. In order to be alone she returns to the house where she grew up, now abandoned and falling apart. (Earlier in the movie, her sister suggests that they sell the house, to at least make something .) It’s here that Rose confronts her actual demons – that she allowed her mother to die of an overdose while Rose did nothing to help. She images the demon appearing and lighting it on fire, but afterwards she realizes that this is a hallucination. She has done nothing to stop the curse. Rose returns to the house, and the demon reveals itself in all of its terrible forms (it has a giant mouth that opens up like something from “Spirited Away”). The demon crawls inside her mouth, fully possessing her. Joel finally gets to the house, only to watch her pouring gasoline on herself and lighting herself on fire. And she’s got a big grin on her face while she does it, which means that she has passed the evil along to Joel.

Yes she does. In a blaze of glory, no less. And worse of all, she infects one of the people she cares most about while doing it.

What does writer/director Parker Finn have to say?

We asked Finn to give us his reading of the ending. Here’s what he had to say: “The movie is an exploration of so many themes and motifs and I think when it comes to trauma or some of the stuff that we carry around inside of us, you can confront it, but it doesn’t mean it goes away. And I wanted to follow it to its worst logical conclusion. Because I think too many movies are tied up with a neat bow. And I think that doesn’t match life. Sometimes good doesn’t win. Sometimes evil wins, evil exists out in the world. And I wanted to create an ending that had an emotional catharsis. And yet, evil persists.” Yes it does persist!

What about star Sosie Bacon?

We also asked Bacon for her take on the ending. “It’s so funny because I started to think about answering these questions and I honestly haven’t given it much thought because I always was just trying to be like, What is Rose thinking about everything ?” Bacon said. “And then as soon as we finished it, I was like, I don’t want to think about it. I never want to think about it again . I think it’s more of what you make of it. I’m interested to see what people make of it because I don’t have as much of an opinion. But what it was like shooting it was dark and scary and cold and fucking creepy.”

Will there be a “Smile” sequel?

Just because Rose is dead doesn’t mean that there can’t be a sequel. Not only is there Joel’s fate that we’ve got to worry about, but any good horror movie worth its salt inspires at least one spin-off or follow-up. (“X” got its own sequel i n the same year , with another film on the way.) Well, how far along is Finn on the path to another “Smile?” We asked him. “I’m just now crossing the finish line after this marathon of making this film,” Finn said. “Of course I think there could be a lot of fun still to be had with ‘Smile,’ but we’ll just have to wait and see.” Sounds like there could be more installments on the horizon.

“Smile” is in theaters now.

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‘smile’ star sosie bacon discusses the horror hit’s wild ending.

The actor also reflects on the most horrifying day of shooting and bucking genre conventions.

By Brian Davids

Brian Davids

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[The following story contains spoilers for Smile .]

Smile may have been a nightmare for Sosie Bacon ’s character, but the experience has been a dream come true for the actor.

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Smile’s ending explained

Director Parker Finn’s horror feature debut, Smile , has finally premiered in theaters. Based on Finn’s 2020 short film, Laura Hasn’t Slept , this film has been praised for its creative scares, the performances of its cast, and its bold exploration of mental illness. While the movie has been widely compared to horror films like The Ring and It Follows , it has still proven itself to be worth the price of a ticket for many moviegoers. For those who are unsure or scared but still curious, here’s everything audiences need to know about this film all the way to its jaw-dropping ending.

This movie follows Dr. Rose Cotter, a therapist who struggles with the trauma of watching her mentally ill mother die from a drug overdose as a child. As an adult, Rose encounters Laura Weaver, a distraught patient claiming to be stalked by an entity with a wicked smile that only she can see. After Laura kills herself in front of Cotter, while wearing a haunting grin, the traumatized doctor finds herself being targeted by the same evil force, and so she tries to uncover the truth to save herself from a terrible fate.

The smiling entity takes many different forms throughout the film, appearing as people Rose knows, or just as complete strangers. The fact that the creature can also create such realistic illusions makes it even more difficult for Rose to know what is and isn’t real. Rose becomes more and more distressed until almost everyone she knows distances themselves from her, with even her boyfriend and sister not wanting to deal with her supposed delusions and interrupt their “perfect” lives.

However, Rose’s cop ex-boyfriend Joel helps her learn more about the entity, discovering that there is a line of cases of people killing themselves with a smile on their faces a week after witnessing their predecessors do the same. Through their research, Rose and Joel discover a man imprisoned for murder who was cursed by the creature but had managed to evade his own death. When Rose meets with the man, he reveals that the entity craves trauma and that he was able to pass the entity’s curse onto someone else by having them witness him kill someone. This leaves Rose with a real Sophie’s choice: kill someone else or let the entity kill her.

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Though Rose has a dream of killing one of her manic hospital patients to pass the curse onto someone else, she realizes that she has to be alone in order to face the entity. Since no one else would be around to witness Rose’s death, the entity would have nowhere else to go. She thus comes face to face with the source of her trauma as she returns to her dilapidated childhood home way out in the countryside. There, she comes face to face with the creature, who takes the form of Rose’s dead mother. Rose admits that she was too scared of her mother to call for help and save her from dying, but she realizes she has to let go of her guilt and move on from her past.

The entity then grows into a large, monstrous version of Rose’s mother, saying that it tormented Rose because her mind was “so willing.” Rose is nearly overpowered by the giant creature, but she gains the upper hand by breaking its arm and setting it ablaze. Rose thus escapes as the house burns to the ground, symbolically walking away from her traumatic past.

The next day, Rose returns to Joel’s apartment and admits the reason why she broke up with him. She explains that she had “forged walls” all her life to prevent people from seeing who she truly was, fearing what they’ll think of her. She became afraid when she saw those walls come down once she met him, showing she suffered a classic “Hedgehog’s dilemma.” But now that she confronted years of embedded trauma, she is finally able to open up.

But when Rose asks if she can stay with Joel, he reveals himself to be the still-living entity with its signature smile, who says it will always be with her. She then runs out of the apartment to find that she is back in the woods in front of her old house, revealing that it was all an illusion crafted by the monster and that she never even left.

The real Joel arrives on the scene, having tracked down Rose’s location. Knowing that she’ll pass the curse onto Joel if he sees her die, Rose runs back into the house in a panic. Inside, the entity reappears and pins Rose to the floor. As the monster reveals its true form, a giant humanoid beast devoid of flesh bearing countless rows of smiles, it makes its way into Rose’s mouth as it possesses her body.

Joel breaks down the door, but he is too late. He finds Rose in the next room smiling, indicating that she has become fully possessed by the creature. She douses herself with lighter fluid and sets herself on fire, and as Joel watches in horror as Rose burns to death, the monster’s curse passes onto him, starting the cycle of trauma and death all over again. As a wise man once said, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

In the end, Smile is all about the vicious cycle of trauma, as the entity embodies how it can be passed on to people who witness others suffer the same way. But the film also displays how society continues to stigmatize mental illness by using words like “crazy” or “headcase” and pushing away people who live with it. Though leaving people with mental illness alone and without treatment can be detrimental to their well-being, in an ironic twist, it was by keeping others at a distance that Rose was able to stall the monster’s spread of trauma. And while she was able to confront her inner demons and find some relief, the fact that the entity survives shows how trauma can still follow someone throughout their life.

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In an era when franchises are everywhere, two of the most under-discussed come from a very similar creative team. Insidious and The Conjuring have been two of the most dominant horror franchises of the last decade, and both franchises spring originally from director James Wan, who directed the first installment of both franchises.

Wan, who has since gone on to make films like Aquaman and Malignant, is one of the more creative minds working on major movies in Hollywood these days, and Insidious and The Conjuring so the promise he's always had as a director.

In 1981, Indiana Jones first graced the big screen in Steven Spielberg's now-classic movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Forty-two years later, it's time for Indy — his movies, his adventures, and his character — to end.

The fifth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, just hit theaters last week to a so-so opening weekend at the box office. The film follows Harrison Ford's titular character as he dons his hat once more after he's pulled into a high-stakes adventure years in the making. Featuring Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Indy's goddaughter Helena Shaw and Mads Mikkelsen as the villainous Nazi Jürgen Voller, Dial of Destiny sees an aged Indiana Jones reckoning with his world and legacy.

Smile Movie Ending Explained (All Questions Answered)

Smile is a 2022 horror movie written and directed by Parker Finn. The story follows a therapist who is haunted by visions of people smiling at her after she witnesses a girl commit suicide in front of her, smiling. Here’s a plot and the ending of the movie Smile explained in short; spoilers ahead.

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To find where to stream any movie or series based on your country, use This Is Barry’s Where To Watch .

Oh, and if this article doesn’t answer all of your questions, drop me a comment or an FB chat message, and I’ll get you the answer . You can find other film explanations using the search option on top of the site.

Smile is finally on Paramount Plus , so do check it out if you have access to the platform.

Smile Movie: Plot Explained In Short – What Happens?

Therapist, Dr Rose Cotter, meets with a graduate student named Laura Weaver, who claims she is being terrorized by an entity in the form of smiling people that no one else can see. After Laura kills herself, Rose starts experiencing hallucinations of people smiling at her and begins to suspect she is cursed.

With the help of her ex-boyfriend, Joel, she learns that witnesses of suicide tend to die by suicide themselves after a few days. And this trail extends to over 15 people. The only way to escape the curse alive is to pass it on by brutally killing someone in front of a witness to traumatize them.

Who is Robert Talley?

Robert is a person who escaped death by brutally murdering someone in front of a witness, passing on his curse to the witness. As a result, he is imprisoned, and Rose meets him to learn that this is the only way to escape the curse and is horrified.

Rose isolates herself in her abandoned childhood home so she can’t pass on the curse. She faces the entity which has taken the form of her mother. Rose manages to set the entity on fire and leaves the burning house free of her curse and trauma, and reunites with her ex-boyfriend, or so the filmmaker makes us believe for a minute.

Smile Movie: Ending Explained: Did Rose Die?

The ending of the movie Smile reveals that Rose defeating and heading to Joel’s place was all a hallucination. In reality, she’s still in her childhood home and gets consumed by the entity. Joel tracks Rose and shows up at the house only to witness her burn herself to death, passing the curse on to him.

Does Joel die?

Joel is the next one marked for death. So unless he murders someone in front of a witness, we can be sure that he will be dead in a week. However, Joel knows much more about the entity and its MO, so the next week of Joel’s life would make for a good sequel.

Frequently Asked Questions Answered

Smile movie: what is the entity is it demonic.

The entity is shown to be a demonic being that thrives by feeding on the trauma of the victims it has possessed and killed over time. We get to see its hideous form right at the end of the film as it takes over Rose’s mind.

Why do they smile in the movie?

The smile is the exact opposite of what the victims go through. The entity feeds on and amplifies trauma to such excruciating amounts that it leaves the victims wanting to kill themselves. The smile that the entity makes them wear as they commit suicide intensifies the trauma of the next witness creating an endless chain.

Smile Movie: How did the cat die?

The entity killed the cat. It is shown that the entity can possess people and get them to kill themselves, but the victims have free will up to that point. It could be that the cat was killed by the entity. How? The entity possessed the cat, and it killed itself. I’m taking a wild guess here; it’s not like the entity can change its MO.

How does the mother die? Did Rose kill her mother?

Rose doesn’t kill her mother but doesn’t save her either. When Rose was young, she found her mother dying from a substance overdose. But Rose had had it with her mother and simply walked away, didn’t call 911, and left her to die. The guilt and trauma of this incident stay with Rose forever, marking her as one of the victims of the entity.

What were your thoughts on the plot and ending of the movie Smile? Comment in the section below.

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

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Smile ending explained: Delving into that dark final twist

A happy ending? No chance.

preview for 13 Reasons Why star's new horror Smile trailer (Paramount)

The movie is available to watch on Paramount+ in the US (we'll have to wait until 2023 in the UK), and whether you're on your first watch or a repeat watch, the dark ending could still leave you with plenty of questions.

Smile follows Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) as she's stalked by an evil entity that appears as sinisterly smiling people close to her (both dead and alive). Much like The Ring or It Follows , the curse is passed on through a seemingly unbreakable cycle.

Rose is tainted by this beast after she witnesses a woman come to her hospital and brutally slit her own throat in front of her. This kicks the events of the movie into motion, but how does it all end?

Smile delivers a fake-out ending and its central monster relies on messing with its victims' minds, so we won't blame you if you got lost along the way. We're here to help though as we delve into Smile 's dark ending.

Smile ending explained

After discovering that the curse kills everybody it has affected, Rose and her ex, Joel (Kyle Gallner), visit the one person who's been able to break the cycle.

Robert Talley (played by Stranger Things ' Rob Morgan) is behind bars because he killed a stranger, transferring the curse to someone else who witnessed it. It's like how you could escape the curse in The Ring by creating another tape and willingly passing it along.

Rose has no desire to brutally murder somebody just to save herself though, even if we think we see her kill one of her patients in front of her boss. This turns out to be one of the entity's hallucinations (remember those), which leads to the "real" climax of the movie.

She heads to the crumbling ruins of her childhood home where we've been led to believe that her mother died by suicide. A flashback reveals that Rose actually could have saved her mother after she overdosed but ran away instead of calling an ambulance.

It's likely that this guilt brought the Smile entity to her in the first place. She battles a physical representation of her inner demons as a twisted and deformed version of her mother, setting fire to it and escaping as the house burns down. She's done it, and with the entity perishing, Rose has seemingly broken the chain… or has she?

Sadly, this is just another Inception moment. Rose reunites with Joel at his apartment but learns she's still inside her family house and he's on the way in real life. The creature means for her to kill herself in front of Joel to make him the next one to carry the curse.

In her final confrontation with this sinister smiler, it attacks Rose as a tall and spindly creature, which rips off its face to reveal rows of toothy grins. The demon forces itself into her mouth, just before Joel breaks into her family home.

Joel arrives in time to see Rose pouring gasoline on herself and then lighting a match. The chilling final shot of Smile zooms into Joel's eye as he watches her burning to death. With Rose dying in a horrifying way, it continues the cycle and secures Joel as its next victim.

Sorry, Joel.

Discussing the harrowing ending(s), writer/director Parker Finn told Polygon how he wanted to lean into the idea that abuse can be passed on and turn victims into perpetrators, as well as purposefully fooling audience expectations:

"Horror audiences have gotten so savvy, so I tried to put myself in their shoes. What would I be expecting? What would I be anticipating? And I tried to subvert that and do something that might catch them off-guard, and kind of flip them on their heads."

It might be frustrating to have to 'dream' endings, but Finn placed that seed in our heads early by showing that the entity can cause hallucinations to manipulate its victims through fear.

"The movie all along teaches you how to watch it, and teaching that you can't trust Rose's perception. It's in the DNA of the movie to mess with the viewer a little," Finn explained of the fake-outs.

"So I wanted to really pay that off with how the movie ends, how what might feel like an ending might not be an ending. I leaned into that. From early on, I knew I was always interested in following the story to its worst logical conclusion.

"But I also wanted to have an emotional catharsis. So I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. Hopefully [the ending] delivers on that."

Looking at the bigger picture, Smile cleverly heightens how mental illness isolates sufferers from others.

Rose is cut off by her fiancé Trevor (Jessie T Usher) and sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), while there are some clever analogies about – quite literally – confronting your childhood trauma, all while putting on a smile to cover up what's going on underneath.

Importantly, Finn wanted to explore mental health and the idea that just because something is happening in someone's head, it doesn't make it any less real to them, insisting, "For that person, the experience is real".

It's no surprise that some of Smile 's rave reviews come from the fact that it's more of a thinking person's horror than your standard supernatural stabber.

Smile is available to watch on Paramount+ in the US. A UK home release is to be confirmed, but it's still out in select cinemas.

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Where to Watch

Watch Smile with a subscription on Prime Video, Paramount+, rent on Fandango at Home, or buy on Fandango at Home.

What to Know

Deeply creepy visuals and a standout Sosie Bacon further elevate Smile 's unsettling exploration of trauma, adding up to the rare feature that satisfyingly expands on a short.

You may need to pay close attention in order to keep up with the story, but fans of slow-burning horror should leave Smile with a grin.

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‘Smile’ Review: Parker Finn’s Supernatural Take on Trauma Will Make You Grimace and Grin

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The phrase “ smile through the pain” takes on a menacing new meaning in “Smile,” as Parker Finn uses an internationally recognized symbol of happiness to elicit fear and evil as part of the film’s exploration of trauma. A smile is nothing more than a mask, and the real horror arises from the true intention behind it.

Sosie Bacon stars as Rose Cotter, a doctor who works in an emergency psychiatric unit and has carried a heavy burden since she witnessed her mother’s suicide at ten years old. Her mental health begins to deteriorate after she assesses a young woman named Laura (Caitlin Stasey) who is brought in for witnessing a suicide. Frantic and begging for someone to believe her, Laura tells Rose that she is being taunted by a being that only she can see; one that smiles and changes its appearance all while delivering a death threat. She then kills herself right in front of a frozen Rose, who later discovers that whatever entity influenced this patient has now latched itself onto her.

Finn fleshes out Rose’s character with backstories and glimpses into the relationships with her boss, her mother, her fiance, and her older sister. Rose’s emotional turmoil is visually engrossing as a result of Bacon’s impressively frenetic performance. As Rose grapples with disturbing hallucinations and the inability to trust those around her, she fluctuates between moments of mania and disconnection. This spectrum of vulnerable paranoia and fear allows Finn to tackle the multilayered complexity of mental health as Rose attempts to convince those around her that what she is experiencing is real.

While this is a tiresome (although realistic) trope in horror, these rapidly changing emotional states allow Bacon’s acting to shine. Feeling alone, despite the care from her therapist (Robin Weigert), Rose finds a sliver of solace in a police officer and former flame, Joel (Kyle Gallner), who helps her piece together the unsettling lineage of this supernatural being’s victims. While the specifics of the monster are hidden, its execution method and purpose are both revealed within a storyline that is sadly traditional and insipid in its structure.

In order to convey Rose’s mental and emotional downward spiral, Finn utilizes an array of strong camera angles that suggest the lack of consistency in her newfound reality. Slowly rotating the camera ninety degrees, inverting the camera completely upside down, invasive close-up shots on the characters’ faces, and beautiful aerial shots all provide an ominous tone with the eerie feeling of being studied and hunted.

The minimalist production design, courtesy of Lester Cohen, focuses on the horrific mental state of its characters instead of painting a typical horror film aesthetic with gothic or dark features. However, there are certain color palettes that nicely symbolize the instability of Rose’s inner mind and physical surroundings. For example, the hospital where she works dons light pink walls (a nod to an old study that found the shade Bake-Miller Pink to reduce aggression) while Rose often wears blue outfits, a color often representing sadness

The plot of “Smile” is exhaustingly reminiscent of other horror predecessors such as “It Follows,” “The Ring,” “Oculus,” and even “Final Destination.” Finn elaborates on a contagious approach to death by factoring in trauma and how grief and depression can have a ripple effect, but the story does not entirely feel like its own beast. To enhance the film’s already heavily pronounced themes, composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer creates a strong soundscape of playfulness and dread which perfectly compliments the juxtaposition used throughout the film’s 116 minute running time.

The sound design and music are as unnerving as the graphic death scenes, but unfortunately come with excessive amounts of jump scares. And the special effects team from Amalgamated Dynamics constructs truly searing imagery that will both shock and delightfully disgust, especially in the third act. Their grisly prosthetic work and creative monster design have a corporeal surrealism which will have horror fans grinning from ear to ear.

“Smile” navigates unhealed trauma through a supernatural lens and mischievous juxtaposition, despite feeling like a shadow of other stories. With rare moments of dark comedy and irony, he is able to expose the forceful nature of society’s expectation to be happy and presentable despite the suffering that may lurk under one’s skin. Overall, “Smile” delivers a captivating and claustrophobic mental hellscape that will cause one to both grimace and grin.

Paramount will release “Smile” in theaters on Friday, September 30.

Most Popular

Eileen Ending Explained: What’s Going On in Anne Hathaway’s New Thriller?

The noir thriller from director William Oldroyd ends with both shocks and ambiguity.

Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Eileen.

The Big Picture

Eileen is a disturbing film about mistreated women seeking freedom.
The mysterious thriller keeps viewers on edge until a shocking climax.
The ambiguous ending raises questions about reality and character development.

Based on the novel of the same name by Ottessa Moshfegh , who also co-wrote the script, Eileen is an effectively disturbing film, a powerful look at the lengths to which mistreated women will go to achieve freedom, justice, and happiness, featuring electrifying performances from stars Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway . Eileen is a mysterious thriller that keeps the viewer at the edge of their seat, until a truly wild climax that ends shockingly and ambiguously. So where does Eileen leave the title character Eileen Dunlop (McKenzie) and the rest of its cast?

A woman's friendship with a new co-worker at the prison facility where she works takes a sinister turn.

What is 'Eileen' About?

The film takes place in 1960s Massachusetts, where Eileen is living a lonely, sad existence. She endures harassment and bullying from co-workers at her job at a correctional facility for young men and verbal abuse from her alcoholic father, Jim ( Shea Whigham ), who constantly compares her unfavorably to her deceased mother and unseen older sister. When the glamorous Rebecca Saint John ( Hathaway ) replaces the prison’s psychologist, Eileen is immediately enamored with the older woman. Rebecca befriends Eileen, further dazzling her with her confident, powerful attitude and unique worldview.

Rebecca is determined to make the prison more humane and take a more active approach to helping inmates with mental health struggles. She becomes especially passionate about helping Lee Polk ( Sam Nivola ), a young man who hacked his father to death, for whom Eileen seems to harbor a romantic and/or sexual fixation. Rebecca is convinced that the horrifically violent nature of the murder suggests that the father must have harmed Lee in a significant way. One day, Eileen observes as Rebecca moderates a visit between Lee and his mother, Rita ( Marin Ireland ), which ends with Rita rushing out of the prison in tears.

Eileen and Rebecca at the Polk Residence

On Christmas Eve, Eileen is delighted to accept an invitation from Rebecca to spend the holiday with her at her home. They have an odd dinner, with Rebecca serving Eileen pickles and cheese, which is all she has in her kitchen. Despite this, Eileen is clearly thrilled to be there. After they continue to bond over drinks for a little while, however, Rebecca shocks Eileen (and viewers who didn’t read the book) by revealing that the house isn’t hers: it’s the Polks’ and that she is holding Rita captive in the basement. Eileen is at first reasonably frightened and goes to leave, but Rebecca stops her.

'Eileen' Review: Anne Hathaway & Thomasin McKenzie Star in Romance-Mystery That Defies Expectations

Rebecca explains that she had come to the house to confront Rita with her suspicions that Lee’s father abused him, which she believed Rita may have been involved in as well. Their conversation devolved into a physical fight, during which they both fell into the basement, incapacitating Rita, who Rebecca then tied up and drugged. Rebecca asks Eileen to stay and serve as a witness while she forces Rita to confess to her complicity. In addition to being frightened, Eileen is initially hurt that Rebecca’s invitation hadn’t been a genuine act of affection. But when Rebecca pleads with her that she needs the support of a friend, Eileen’s burgeoning romantic and obsessive feelings for her—as well as her own darker impulses—win out, and she agrees to help, even getting her father’s gun out of her car to threaten Rita with.

How Does 'Eileen' End?

The pair descend into the basement, where Rebecca pressures Rita to confess while Eileen holds the gun pointed at her. Rita is at first defiant, rebuking them and threatening them with the consequences of abducting her. But after Eileen makes a surprisingly convincing threat to kill her, she eventually breaks down. She tearfully admits that her husband sexually abused Lee over a long period and that she knew he was doing so. Initially, she had been so horrified that she couldn’t make herself admit the abuse was real by reporting it, but she also admitted that she continued to keep quiet because she began to believe that it was improving her and her husband’s marriage. As she finishes the story, Eileen suddenly shoots her in the chest, with the disturbingly simple justification that, “I got upset.”

Despite having been the one to initiate the abduction and interrogation, Rebecca is horrified and begins making meager attempts at giving Rita medical attention. But E ileen urges her to stop, believing that Rita deserves to die, and telling Rebecca she loves her. She says that they could get away with killing her by framing her father and run away to live together. Jim has repeatedly been in trouble with the police for drunkenly brandishing his gun and pointing it at neighbors, so much so that an officer had Eileen take custody of the gun. Jim also worked on Lee’s case when he was on the police force, making him the perfect patsy. Rebecca agrees, and they force-feed Rita tranquilizers to knock her out.

Eileen and Rebecca put Rita in Eileen’s car and agree to meet at her house, where they will stage a scene to make Jim look guilty. But Rebecca never comes. Eileen waits for her until early in the morning, when she drives the car deep into the woods and leaves Rita in it with the windows up so the smoky exhaust the old car constantly emits will kill her. Eileen then walks back to the road and hitches a ride on a passing truck that is driving out of town, likely to fulfill her long-standing dream of going to New York City.

What Does the Ending of 'Eileen' Mean for the Characters?

The ending, which excludes some final scenes from the novel set significantly later , maintains and increases the mysterious ambiguity that makes Eileen , both the character and the film, so interesting, and raises many new questions. In addition to her surprising initial reaction to the shooting, Rebecca not meeting Eileen makes the viewers reconsider a lot of what they thought they knew about the character. Some viewers may even consider the idea that Rebecca wasn’t actually a real person, but a figment of Eileen’s imagination, an interpretation of the novel Moshfegh seems to support, having told The Guardian , “Rebecca was somebody else’s character, a character from a movie or book read long ago. She is an imaginary person in another sense too in that Eileen has imagined her.” Even if one thinks she is real, her reaction to the shooting and choosing not to join Eileen show that she is arguably more moral and less disturbed than Eileen , when the earlier parts of the film led one to believe the opposite.

Eileen’s final expression is also thought-provoking. In the final scene, as the truck drives, she smiles to herself, leaving the viewer to wonder why she would do so. While it makes sense that she would be relieved to get away with the murder, and likely also happy to be free of her father and her dreary hometown, she is once again as alone as she was before Rebecca came into her life . This could be argued to lend further support to the idea of Rebecca being imaginary. If that’s the case, perhaps Eileen’s mind subconsciously created Rebecca to develop her confidence and agency. Now that she believes she has done so by killing Rita and leaving, Rebecca is no longer needed.

From this point of view, the smile would be seen as evidence of Eileen realizing she has become more powerful and taken control of her life, no longer needing her imaginary alter-ego. If Rebecca was real, the smile is a little more confounding, as one would assume that Eileen would still be fairly hurt that the woman she loved didn’t come with her. If she is smiling despite that, the film’s argument may be that her freeing herself from her oppressive life was more important than her starting a romance with Rebecca. McKenzie’s performance throughout the film is excellent, but her work is especially striking in this scene, as she delivers the smile in a way that allows different viewers to read it as suggesting many different meanings .

Eileen is now available to watch on Hulu in the U.S.

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Scares, frights, and other delights! Strap in, because we're running down everything we know about the horror movies and shows coming in 2024 and beyond! We cover everything from 'Lisa Frankenstein' to 'A Quiet Place: Day One,' 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' to 'Terrifier 3.'

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Shocking Horror Movie ‘The Coffee Table’ Is Earning Raves From Stephen King. Its Director Wants Audiences to ‘Suffer’ and ‘Hate Me’

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Shocking Horror Movie ‘The Coffee Table’ Is Earning Raves From Stephen King. Its Director Wants Audiences to ‘Suffer’ and ‘Hate Me’ 2 days ago

THE COFFEE TABLE, (aka LA MESITA DEL COMEDOR), David Pareja, 2022. © Cinephobia Releasing / Courtesy Everett Collection

The poster for the innocuously named “ The Coffee Table ” notes that it is “A Cruel Caye Casas Film.” The unique designation is certainly fitting, given the storm of controversy it’s stirring up among horror fans. The comically vague logline for the Spanish film — new parents buy a coffee table that will change their lives forever — hides a shocking incident that happens early on. Said incident is not for the faint of heart, and director and co-writer Casas is eager to not only lean into the controversy but take willing audiences on an emotional journey of horror without monsters or the supernatural. Without spoiling the central incident, Casas explained his film to Variety , including how much he wanted to push audiences, the unique title and how he reacted when Stephen King recommended his work. (Note: This interview was conducted over email for accuracy between the Spanish and Catalan-speaking Casas and the English-speaking author.) How did the idea for this film come about?

Popular on Variety

Who do you think the audience for this movie is? Are there some people who wouldn’t be able to handle it?

I have always thought that the film is aimed at audiences who want strong, extreme, unforgettable emotions. The horror audience is like that. I am a member of the horror audience and my great hope is to make them suffer, have a terrible time, hate me, but above all make them feel strong emotions. Now many productions are made with a lot of money that don’t make you feel anything, which is always the same, that you forget about them two days after seeing them. I think that “The Coffee Table” makes anyone who sees it feel an unforgettable experience, whether they like it or not. In fact, it is not for everyone, there are people who will not tolerate it, and I understand that.

What have audience reactions been like so far? Have you seen walkouts?

People’s response has been fucking incredible. I have gone to many festivals with the film, to many countries, and people always react by being shocked, they can’t believe what they see. Some leave the room, they can’t stand it, but there is also laughter about it. Black humor, the most macabre laugh, others feel guilty for laughing, but the majority have a very bad time, tension, anxiety. It is very fun to see the faces of the audience. In Mexico, they insulted me while watching the film. It was a joke, but they insulted me for torturing them — although, later, that same audience gave me the audience award at the Macabre Festival.

As a filmmaker, were you trying to show empathy for any of the characters, or just portray the events neutrally?

All the characters have something personal, they have something of mine, all of them. With these characters, I wanted to convey how any of our lives can change in a second, we can experience real hell and we don’t need monsters or zombies or anything to live in hell. Let everyone judge the characters as they want, I don’t, they came from my head and there is no one that is my favorite. What is important is that only the protagonist and the audience know what has happened, and that makes the tension unbearable, it makes the audience suffer as much as the protagonist, and that is what works like a time bomb.

How did you decide how much of the key incident in the movie you wanted to show onscreen?

I was clear that I did not want to make a gore film, and I was clear that imagination is an important weapon that the public has. Why show certain things when in your thinking it could be worse? You have to make the viewer’s mind work, sometimes less is more, and imagining what is happening is sometimes stronger than seeing it. It was very clear that some scenes were going to be shot out of frame, so that they could be seen as little as possible, the audience already knows that what happened is horrible.

There is lighthearted music playing during some dark moments. What was the inspiration behind that juxtaposition?

To be contradictory. When a great tragedy happens, sometimes it is better not to play the typical scary music and instead play a children’s song, as in this case. It is more disturbing, and with the composer of the OST, Bambikina, we were clear that we did not want to make the typical horror movie soundtrack, because this is not the typical horror movie. It’s different from everything, and the soundtrack had to be too.

Did you always have the ending in mind while writing the film?

What was the inspiration behind naming the film, simply, “The Coffee Table”?

All horror movies have powerful, dark, scary names. I wanted to make a terrifying film but with a harmless, ridiculous, everyday name… “The Coffee Table,” and in Spanish, “La Mesita Del Comedor.” Seriously, is a movie like that, that disturbing? The answer is yes. I also wanted to trick the viewer, I’m going to watch this movie with this silly name, and wham! They are left speechless. Besides, it is clear that the coffee table is the main protagonist of the film… don’t you think?

Do you want to focus on more horror movies and dark dramas in the future?

I have several projects for which I am looking for money. I have a very terrifying, unbearable, brutal but also philosophical one that would make horror audiences’ heads explode. It is titled “Dreams” and it is brutal. I have others that are incredible black comedies, so that people have a good time laughing at death, like a movie called “Bad Death.” Another cruel and macabre horror titled “Welcome,” another about a really disturbing television show titled “Luciferio.” But I also have films that are not 100% genre, like “Nothing Co” (which is one of my favorite stories) or “Mom’s Wish,” which is an original and different comedy. I like almost all genres, but I have a great time writing horror. Now the important thing is to find financing so that they exist and the public has fun… Is there anyone interested?

Stephen King tweeted that he loved the movie. What does it mean to have a horror master praise your work?

There is only one King of Terror, and that is Stephen King. What more can I say? That the King recommends your film to his audience, that he says that it is the darkest thing he has ever seen… It’s so exciting, it’s one of those things that I will explain to my grandchildren (although I don’t have children). It’s one of those things that you think will never happen and it does. The King has recommended an independent Spanish film shot in 10 days at a friend’s house and with a ridiculous budget. And not only the King has done it, but also teachers like [director] Mick Garris, who was the one who sent the film to Stephen King because he loved it. It’s an orgasm. I won’t tell you that I masturbated watching the King’s tweet talking about my movie (did I?), but I will die with a smile on my face just thinking about it.

“The Coffee Table” is now available on VOD. Watch the trailer below.

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Hana, a young girl in a coat and beanie, looks up in a snowy forest in the film Evil Does Not Exist

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Evil Does Not Exist offers no answers for its terrifying questions

The existential horror film of the year is about glamping

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I spent a lot of time contemplating the title of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film Evil Does Not Exist . It still echoes in my brain, as I watch and rewatch the film. It’s a puzzle to turn over, a bitter lozenge lodged in my cheek. It’s almost farcical, how banal the movie’s premise is: a talent agency wants to set up a glamping site in a remote Japanese village, and sends two hapless PR reps to sell the community on the plan. Most of us don’t contemplate the nature of evil when considering glamping , you know? But maybe we should.

At its most obvious, Evil Does Not Exist is an environmentalist fable. Hamaguchi, who previously directed Drive My Car , moves at a languid pace, and the sparseness of his script means that, on a plot level, few things happen in this movie. The film is built around a 20-minute town-hall meeting . Otherwise, it mostly follows Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower raising a young daughter, Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) and earning a living doing odd jobs in his mountain village. He collects water from a spring for a local restaurant, splits firewood, and does whatever else needs doing. Hamaguchi is happy to have the camera follow Takumi at a comfortable distance as he goes about his day.

Through Takumi’s eyes, the audience gets a clear point of view on the community reaction to the agency’s plans for a glamping development, as the locals articulate their relationship with the environment and how the project would destroy that. It’s quite clear, though, that the agency’s interest in community input is solely for optics. No one actually cares what the villagers think.

And the agency’s owner — who can’t be bothered to show up to the town hall himself — doesn’t even seem that invested in the glamping endeavor. The company’s stated goal isn’t in branching out into recreational services, but in obtaining pandemic subsidies from the government to boost its bottom line. You could call that evil.

Two business people sit at a table with a slide projecting behind them that says GLAMPING in the film Evil Does Not Exist

Hamaguchi began work on Evil Does Not Exist with the intention of creating a visual art piece to accompany the work of musician Eiko Ishibashi, who also composed the score for Drive My Car . Even expanded into a 106-minute feature film, Evil Does Not Exist retains the feeling of an abstract tone poem, more about what the viewer has to say in response than about anything the filmmaker puts on screen. The moral obviousness of the film’s central conflict, therefore, feels like a trick — a sleight of hand, a dare to watch more closely.

It’s easy to idealize Takumi’s life, the way Takahashi (Ryûji Kosaka), one of the agency reps, does upon meeting him. Takahashi and his colleague Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) return to the village after the town-hall meet goes poorly, with instructions to offer Takumi a job at the glamping site so he can convince the other villagers to support the development. Takahashi, however, fantasizes about running off and just living in Takumi’s village, gushing about how good it feels to chop wood, to do something with his hands.

A figure in a coat and beanie seen crouching from behind at the edge of a half-frozen lake, the woods reflecting on its surface in the film Evil Does Not Exist.

Both Takumi and Takahashi — like everyone in the village, like you or I would be, were we to find ourselves in front of Hamaguchi’s camera — are still strangers to the natural world that this fictional village is built around and depends on. It is possible to be respectful to that world, as a village elder says during the town hall, noting the community’s responsibility to think of everything downstream of them. But it’s arrogant to think we truly understand the wilds around us. To behave as if we belong.

In this, Evil Does Not Exist leans toward a folk-horror tradition, as Hamaguchi slowly pivots away from dispassionate naturalism, building to an impressionistic, opaque finale. The provocation of the film’s title echoes through the woods, which the film begins and ends by regarding from below. Maybe that’s what the title is getting at. Maybe it’s a whisper echoing through and from the ground itself, about how foolish it is to believe that the earth, even in its stillness and beauty, has any regard for our moral attitude toward it. Maybe we ought to tread more carefully, and be fearful in our taking. Maybe evil only matters because we’re here to think about it, and when we’re gone, it will be too.

Evil Does Not Exist opened in limited theatrical release May 3, with a wider rollout May 10 and beyond.

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'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes' spoilers! Here's what the ending really means

Spoiler alert! We're discussing important plot points and the ending of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” ( in theaters now ), so swing to another treetop if you haven’t seen it yet.

The original "Planet of the Apes" movie rocked audiences in 1968 with its combination of astounding makeup and shocking ending. Astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston), free of his ape tormentors and on a horseback trek along a beach, comes across the vestiges of the Statue of Liberty.

Thinking he had landed on a distant planet, Taylor suddenly is confronted with the grim reality that he's actually journeyed to a future Earth decimated by warmongering humans. "You maniacs!" he screams. "You blew it up!"

After eight follow-up films − including a recent reboot trilogy that wrapped in 2017 − comes "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes," with final scenes that seem poised to launch a new series.

Set generations after the death of Caesar, the simian leader in the rebooted trilogy, "Kingdom" features a brave but naive ape, Noa (Owen Teague), who befriends an intrepid human, Mae (Freya Allan). Their intertwined journeys culminate in an intriguing ending about which the actors and director Wes Ball offer cryptic comments.

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What happens in the ending of 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes'?

Noa lives in the blissful world of the Eagle Clan of chimps, who have made their home in overgrown utility pole towers. But that bliss comes to an end when his camp is overrun by aggressive apes from a nearby valley who like to hunt humans − who are now feral, nonverbal beasts − for sport.

In one such invasion, the apes capture both Noa and Mae, who we later learn has retained the ability to speak. The two of them are brought to a chimpanzee labor camp, where they learn to trust each other. Mae reveals that a cave the evil apes are trying to break into contains important technology that can help her reconnect with other sentient humans.

The duo succeeds in their mission, allowing Noa to rebuild his clan and Mae to deliver a critical computer cartridge to a group of humans who live in a bunker filled with satellite technology. In the final scene of the movie, Mae is with these scientists, all clearly survivors of the human-dominated Earth, who reboot radio telescopes and make voice contact with other humans. Noa meanwhile is shown taking his close friend Anaya to an abandoned telescope and she peers through the lens. What does Anaya see in space?

The screen suddenly fades to black.

Is the planet Noa and Anaya are looking at through the telescope Earth?

It's tempting to think that the twist here is that the apes no longer live on Earth and that the humans on this planet are using a radio telescope to connect with people back on our blue marble.

But no, the action takes place on Earth. The giveaways are found not just in the various overgrown buildings and streets seen in the film, but in the specificity of one shot that features the remnants of the parabolic arches that define the center of Los Angeles International Airport.

"Imagine that, if we weren't told (as actors) that we are all actually on Mars," Allan says with a laugh. "But no, my character has maps of towns." Addes Teague: "We're all in LA."

So what planet are the chimps looking at through the telescope at the end of 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes'?

Earlier in the movie, Noa comes across a huge abandoned telescope and peers through its small eyepiece and is startled by what he sees. But we don't know what it is. At the end of the movie, he feels compelled to bring his friend to see for herself.

The decision to fade to black instead of revealing what the two saw was an easy one for Ball. "I figured there is nothing I could show you that would be stronger than what the audience's imagination would conjure up," he says. "Sure, it might turn some people off, but some people will like it. I have ideas of what they're looking at."

Mars, maybe? Ball laughs. "Right, they're looking at (SpaceX founder) Elon Musk flying around on his Falcon 9 rocket," he says. "But I'll just say this. Space obviously is a key idea in all of these movies. So, maybe it's them looking to the future?"

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‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Review: Hail, Caesar

The latest installment in an excellent series finds mythology turning into power.

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‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director wes ball narrates a sequence from his film..

I’m Wes Ball, director of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.” This is a little sequence in the very beginning of the movie after our trio of apes here, Noa, Soona and Anaya, have just had a little adventure and they’re on their way back to their village, where we get to meet the life of Eagle Clan and where Noa and his family reside, this little isolated existence. And we get to see the way the apes live in this world with their eagles. And and how this ritual of collecting their egg, which they’re going to raise as companions, which is part of the way the Eagle Clan kind of works in their culture. And the goal was really just to set up a world that was wonderful, that was ultimately going to be forever changed when the course of events leads to Noa’s village being attacked for the most part, everything you see here was actually shot with the actors. We shoot it twice, we shoot it once with the actors and all of their little performance things and the camera movement and everything. So we are shooting a regular movie. It just happens to be that these guys are wearing these kind of strange suits along with the cameras and the dots on their face that captures all the performance. And then I have to go in and then re- duplicate those shots without the apes, which is where I choose. Whatever performance I choose now gets dropped into the scene itself. So this isn’t something where we just kind of animate the characters after the fact. We’re actually on location and they’re there in their digital costumes, essentially, acting out everything you see on camera, with the exception of, say, background action, there’s a group of apes in the background playing what we called monkey ball, and just we did that all on stage. So that’s kind of the beauty of the power of this process, is that we can populate this whole scene with hundreds of apes. But we only needed a handful of apes on set. This is Dar, Noa’s mother, who’s a fantastic character, played by Sara Wiseman, who did a great job. “I knew you would climb well.” “He waits.” And this character of Noa here, you kind start to see this relationship that he has with his father, which is an interesting kind of relationship that I imagine a lot of people could relate to. They don’t know quite how to communicate with each other, but there’s obviously still love there. It’s an interesting process where I can take all these different little elements and layer them all together and stack them into this — what you see is the end result here, this little idyllic community.

By Alissa Wilkinson

For a series with a goofy premise — what if talking apes overthrew humanity — the “Planet of the Apes” universe is uncommonly thoughtful, even insightful. If science fiction situates us in a universe that’s just different enough to slip daring questions past our mental barriers, then the “Apes” movies are among the best examples. That very premise, launched with talking actors in ape costumes in the 1968 film, has given storytellers a lot to chew on, contemplating racism, authoritarianism, police brutality and, in later installments, the upending of human society by a brutal, fast-moving virus. (Oops.)

Those later virus-ridden installments, a trilogy released between 2011 and 2017, are among the series’ best, and well worth revisiting. The newest film, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” picks up exactly where that trilogy left off: with the death of Caesar, the ultrasmart chimpanzee who has led the apes away from what’s left of humanity and into a paradise. (The scene was a direct quotation of the story of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, but dying before he could set foot there.) The apes honor his memory and vow to keep his teachings, especially the first dictum — “ape not kill ape.” Caesar preached a gospel of peacefulness, loyalty, generosity, nonaggression and care for the earth; unlike the humans, they intend to live in harmony.

The teachings of peaceful prophets, however, tend to be twisted by power-seekers, and apparently this isn’t just a human problem. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” directed by Wes Ball from a screenplay by Josh Friedman, leaps forward almost immediately by “many generations” (years matter less in this post-human world), and the inevitable has happened. The apes have fractured into tribes, while Caesar has passed from historical figure to mythic one, a figure venerated by some and forgotten by most.

That there even was a Caesar is unknown to Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee whose father, Koro (Neil Sandilands) is leader of his clan and an avid breeder of birds. That clan has its own laws, mostly having to do with how to treat birds’ nests, and that’s all that Noa and his friends Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) have known.

But then one day tragedy strikes, in the form of an attack on the clan by the soldiers of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the leader of a clan of coastal apes. Noa finds himself alone, searching for his clan, who have been carted away. On his journey Noa meets a human (Freya Allen) who, like the other humans, doesn’t speak.

At this point in the evolution of the virus, mutations have rendered any surviving humanity speechless and dull-witted, living in roving bands and running from predators; to the apes it’s as preposterous to imagine a talking human as a talking ape is to us. But he also meets Raka (Peter Macon), who believes himself to be the last of the faithful followers of Caesar’s peaceful teachings, even wearing Caesar’s diamond-shaped symbol around his neck. (Eagle-eyed viewers will recall that the symbol echoes the shape of the window in the room in which Caesar was raised as a baby.) Noa learns from Raka. And when he finds what he’s looking for, he realizes he has an important job to do.

Two apes and a woman with serious looks stand near a body of water.

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is not quite as transporting as the previous trilogy, perhaps because the apes now act so much like humans that the fruitful dissonance in our minds has mostly been mitigated. It’s simpler to imagine the apes as just stand-in humans when they’re all talking, and thus easier to just imagine you’re watching, say, “The Lion King” or something.

But there’s still a tremendous amount to mull over here, like Proximus Caesar, who borrows the idea of Caesar to prop up his own version of leadership. The real Caesar was undoubtedly strong and brave, but Proximus Caesar has mutated this into swagger and shows of force, an aggression designed to keep his apes in line. He is not brutal, exactly; He is simply insistently powerful and more than a bit of a fascist. Every morning, he greets his subjects by proclaiming that it is a “wonderful day,” and that he is Caesar’s rightful heir, and that they must all work together as one to build their civilization ever stronger.

Visual cues indicate that Proximus Caesar’s kingdom is modeled partly on the Roman Empire, with its colonizing influence and its intention to sweep the riches of the ancient human world — its history, its labor, its technology — into its own coffers. By telling his version of Caesar’s legacy, Proximus Caesar makes the apes believe they are part of some mighty, unstoppable force of history.

But of course, history has a habit of repeating itself, whether it’s ancient Rome or Egypt, and in Proximus Caesar’s proclamations one detects a bit of Ozymandias : Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair! “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is set in the future, but like a lot of science fiction — “Dune,” for instance, or “Battlestar Galactica,” or Walter Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” — there’s a knowing sense that all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

That’s what makes “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” powerful, in the end. It probes how the act of co-opting idealisms and converting them to dogmas has occurred many times over. What’s more, it points directly at the immense danger of romanticizing the past, imagining that if we could only reclaim and reframe and resurrect history, our present problems would be solved. Golden ages were rarely actually golden, but history is littered with leaders who tried to make people believe they were anyhow. It’s a great way to make people do their bidding.

There are some hints near the end of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” of what might be next for the franchise, should it be fated to continue. But the uneasy fun of the series is we already know what happens, eventually; it was right there in the first movie, and the warning it poses remains bleak.

At the start of the 1968 film, the star Charlton Heston explains, “I can’t help thinking somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.” You might have expected, from a movie like this, that “better” species would be these apes. But it turns out we might have to keep looking.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Rated PG-13, for scenes of peril and woe and a couple of funny, mild swear words. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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