That is really all that can be said about it. Other horror movies have monsters or clowns or serial killers in hockey masks. Not Smile. Smile’s antagonist is an entity that spreads from one person to the next by suicides. That is why it is so memorable for audiences and made $16 million in box office money. Smile follows Rose Cotter, a physiotherapist at a mental hospital. She is easy to like, which is conveyed by one scene towards the beginning of the movie where she says to a coworker who tells her about one patient’s insurance issue, “Maybe we should just focus on doing our jobs here!” It was that intensity and her mother’s mental health issues that led her into the mental health field. Smile has a lot to say about mental health and there is a clear theme of mental wellness throughout it. 

Everyone who has seen Smile knows about its unique antagonist, some sort of entity that never really gets a name. During Rose’s forced week off, she investigates all she can about it all while dealing with the effects of it. This is when the theme of mental wellness comes in: Rose shows that the people that need it most are the ones running from it, whether it is inside or outside of their control. Rose had spent her life championing mental wellness for everyone except for herself and it came back to haunt her. It is like the oxygen mask in an airplane metaphor: you can’t help others get their mask on until you get yours on. Rose has this backwards, and the movie follows the effects of that. But again, her intensity keeps her going. Her intensity helps her fight through the entity, which shows up at random times and actively tries to ruin her life. People have made fun of the movie on social media, saying people who are afraid of smiles are weird. Not so. If someone with a mental illness is constantly smiling, it could just be a way to mask how they really feel, which goes back to mental wellness. 

Eventually, Rose thinks she needs to be alone to rest her demons so to speak. Besides, she doesn’t want to pass the entity to anyone else. Every horror movie has at least one moment where the main character does something that seems idiotic to the audience like going into a room they shouldn’t out of curiosity. That is this moment in Smile. Why would it be a good idea for someone who is basically demon possessed to be alone in an old house? Then the entity comes back in the form of Rose’s mother, who died of drug overdose with Rose at her side when Rose was very young. Anyone who has ever seen a horror movie knew that something like that was going to happen. Obviously, in the end Rose burns herself to death in front of her ex-boyfriend Joel, which is where the movie ended. That is one thing that most fans of the film have in common: they hated the ending. The movie had so much going for it and it could have ended so much differently. 

The purpose of this movie was to show the importance of mental health and maintaining mental wellness. It did a good job of that, especially showing how one person’s illness or past trauma can spread and affect so many people. Smile is for anyone who wants a new horror movie, not one that is very predictable.