Smile-- My take on the movie with spoilers!

 Plot: After a patient commits suicide in front of her, Dr. Rose believes the curse has been passed on to her.

Smile. Even if you don't feel like it. Even when you are in pain or have faced a traumatic event. You have to show you are strong.

How many of us are forced to wear smiles because of this? That false smile that is part of a mask for what we truly want to express. Sooner or later, that smile becomes something we despise. It isn't natural. That smile is something we are forced to wear.

I did like how the movie SMILE was a metaphor for the trauma people conceal behind smiles. The Smile curse did pass on to those people who have suffered some kind of trauma.

The movie however was a little dull except for the first few minutes which sets up the story. After that it dwindles and at one point you can't wait for it to finally end.

There are also jump scares galore in this movie and maybe only one of them actually works.

Smile is one of those movies you shouldn't go with high expectations and you just may enjoy it.

SMILE Movie Plot

The movie opens with a woman laying on the bed. She has clearly overdosed and her bedroom is shabby. A little girl stands by the doorway and cries.

Cut to the present and we see Dr Rose wake up from a dream. The little girl was her. She had watched her mother die. Her dreams follow a proper pattern and is a memory.

Dr Rose has been sleeping on the job.

She is then given the case of a man called Carl who keeps muttering about people dying and that he will too. Dr Rose tries to help him and he lets her in just a little bit.

Her next patient is a young woman called Laura. The nurse explains that Laura had witnessed her professor bludgeon himself to death and so she is severely traumatized.

Dr Rose cautiously enters the room but doesn’t find her patient on those ugly blue chairs.

She turns around and is startled to see a young woman standing in the corner. It takes a lot of convincing for Laura to come sit across from Rose.

The actress who plays Laura does a terrific job portraying her fear and anguish. She knows what she's about to say is ridiculous but she has to tell someone nevertheless.

Dr Rose gets her to talk and promises not to judge. Laura talks about how after the professor killed himself, she has been seeing people who are giving her weird, creepy smiles. She says it is this thing that is wearing masks of people.

Dr Rose thinks its a standard case of schizophrenia but Laura begins to cry as she realizes this creepy smile thing is going to come after her and kill her and no one is ready to believe her.

This is perhaps the best scene in te movie for sure. Raw and frightening.

Dr Rose tells her to look at her and when Laura does, she sees something that causes her to scream and fall backwards on her chair.

Dr Rose gets up too. Crash goes the vase! Laura cowers and blubbers while Dr Rose freezes. Just then she feels something behind her and move past. Laura is still screaming and Rose finally calls for assistance. Except she turned her back so she doesn’t see Laura being dragged.

When she turns back, Laura is standing behind her, giving her the creepiest smile in this movie. She then uses a shard from the vase to cut herself from ear to ear. Kind of like a huge smile.

Rose is shocked. Assistance arrives and later so does the detective.

As luck would have it, one of the detectives, Joel, is her ex-boyfriend.

From hereon the movie becomes sort of a cliché. Every horror movie trope is added. No one believes the protagonist. Check. Her family thinks she's crazy and asks her to stay away. Check. Even her fiancé doesn’t believe her. Check. She must run into the arms of her ex, the only one who truly loved her and believes in her. Oh, and he is also ready to risk his life for her.

All this so that the protagonist realizes she was the one who wrong and shouldn’t have let him go.

The only thing different is the ending.

The two detectives talk to Rose who is clearly rattled. The scene cuts to Laura's body in the morgue. The sheet has become soaked with Laura's blood. The shape is of a smile.

Rose heads home and relaxes with a glass of wine. She doesn't bother turning on lights and so sees something in the corner of her kitchen. It's a woman grinning at her.

Crash! There goes the glass.

Luckily for her, Trevor, her fiancé shows up. The poor guy has to clean shattered glass throughout the movie. He should have just bought plastic glasses for Rose.

Rose watches while Trevor cleans up and they talk about whether they should skip dinner with her sister considering the day she just had.

Rose doesn’t want to and they go. Throughout the dinner, her sister Holly prattles on while Rose stares at her glass. She doesn't break this one.

Holly asks her something and Rose realizes she's forgotten about her nephew Jackson's birthday. Holly makes a thing about it and the conversation moves to their childhood home. Holly and her husband want to sell it. Rose tells her to shut up about the house.

They need to keep it because it is the venue for the climax.

The next day, Rose tries to focus on her work but is clearly distracted.

Joel shows up to talk and to make sure the viewers understand that he still has obvious feelings for her. Rose rebuffs him and the nurse tells Joel that Rose is engaged. However, she is available. Joel doesn't seem interested. The nurse is all smiles and attitude. He likes people who are deeply troubled.

Holly calls her up to apologize and tells her to come to Jackson's birthday even though Rose told her she works Saturdays and even though Holly's husband had remarked about joining a private clinic instead.

Rose says she will try and is distracted yet again when she thinks she sees Laura in the distance, smiling at her. Holly tells her that her son is into trains and so she should gift him one. Rose finds the woman gone and gets back into conversation with her sister.

Later, as she is walking past patient rooms, she sees Carl sitting on his bed with a creepy smile. She tries to get him to talk and he screams at her face that she is going to die. The orderlies come to restrain Carl as he gets hyper.

Rose is rattled by this event. She is advised by Dr Desai to take a break but she insists she needs to work. Afterwards, she sees Laura again but then she disappears. Rose goes to a hobby shop to buy Jackson a train and is clearly not bothered by how the packing is done. She has to be reminded to pay.

When Rose goes home, she wraps up the gift while drinking. As she roams about the house, the security alarm goes off.

Crash! There goes another glass.

Rose checks the house but finds the front door locked. She is pondering on whether the back door was locked or not when she receives a call from the security company. She tells them it was a false alarm but the woman on the other end taunts her and Rose realizes she is been caught in a dream-like reality. She awakens from it and finds she isn’t holding the phone. The phone rings and this time it isn’t the creepy smile entity.

Rose tells her to call the police as she suspects a break-in.

The police is called and they sweep the whole house but don't find any intruders. Trevor arrives and is confused about what is going on.

Rose tells him she is still upset about what she went through. Trevor consoles her and Rose realizes she hasn't seen her cat the whole day. She tries to call for her cat that she has named Mustache.

It comes at a convenient time. Now she has Trevor to pick up the mess she made. Trevor sighs but gets back to sweeping off broken glass.

Mustache on the other hand, does not come at her beck and call. Rose becomes disturbed.

On Saturday, Rose heads to her nephew's birthday party where Holly shows her off to her friend. One of her friends wants free psychiatric advise. Rose does not indulge her.

It's present opening time and when Jackson is about to open Rose's gift we know from the build up that it isn't going to be a train. Then what could it be?

Jackson is shocked when he opens a box that says train on it. Holly asks her son what is the gift, even though the box does say Train.

Jackson doesn’t turn the box around or pick it up and show his parents. He pulls out a dead Mustache from the box like a magician.

Rose screams as she notices the cut at the throat is shaped like a smile.

Everyone at the party is shocked and Rose tries to explain she didn't kill her cat. No one believes her and think Rose is having a psychotic breakdown.

The party guest who was asking for free advice, smiles at Rose. The same, creepy smile.

Rose stumbles and falls back onto the glass table, cutting both her arms. She screams.

In the next instant she is sent to the hospital she works in. She watches Trevor enter only to meet Holly first who is clearly complaining about the fiasco.

Dr Desai comes in and tells Rose to take a paid work leave. It's clear she is not in her senses.

Trevor takes her home and she finally tells him what is going on with her. He thinks she is paranoid and doesn't believe about her creepy smile demon.

Rose then meets her therapist Dr Madeline who thinks her meltdown is because of the trauma she faced as her child. Rose now feels like Laura when she realizes that everyone thinks she's nuts and is going to be killed. She also keeps seeing the creepy smiley person and can't tell when someone is real or not.

Rose decides to don a detective hat and find out exactly what happened to Laura.

She finds out that the professor who killed himself was Gabriel Munoz. She finds his address and goes to his house to talk to his wife on the pretense of being a reporter.

The wife is still grieving and tells Rose how her husband said he was seeing things right after he came back from his conference where he witnessed the suicide of a woman.

Rose tells the widow she has been seeing the same things. Of course the widow gets upset and throws Rose out of the house before revealing the name of the woman who killed herself in front of her husband. Being a therapist, Rose could have taken a different approach but clearly she is becoming desperate as her life is on the line.

Next step: going back to her ex. She knocks on his door and enters before he can invite her in. She knows Joel is still hung up on her and she intends to use that as an advantage.

Joel of course breaks all rules to help her, even letting her access crime scene photos. She finds out the name of the woman and Joel is surprised to find that the woman had someone die in front of her too. They are able to trace down more incidents to people passing on the smiling curse.

Rose goes home leaving Joel to do more detective work. At home, Madeline is sitting comfortably on her sofa. Trevor tells her that he has been worried about her mental health.

Before Madeline can say anything, Rose pretty much insults her. Madeline looks like she's used to being insulted by patients. Rose tells Trevor she regrets confiding in him. She storms out and Trevor is unsure if they broke up or not.

Rose goes to see Holly next. Her husband opens the door and tells her it isn't a good idea for her to come for a visit. Rose insists on seeing her sister. Holly comes over and pretty much tells her husband to buzz off and not interfere in sisterly business.

Holly and Rose get into who should have done what for their mother. Holly gets pissed off at her and then horrified when she sees the photos Rose is carrying with her. Clearly Joel is okay with her roaming around with crime scene photos and showing them off.

Rose is told to get lost. She sits in her car and is clearly regretting her argument with her sister when she sees Holly exiting her house.

Now she's blurred so let's anticipate something along the lines of a jump scare happening.

Rose opens the window and mutters an apology only for Holly to get an elongated neck and bend down her smiley face.

Rose shrieks. Her meltdown is witnessed by Jackson who looks like he doesn’t want to hangout with his not so cool aunt Rose anymore.

Joel comes to see her and tells her he traced it all to twenty incidents but only nineteen suicides. Rose asks about the one who didn’t commit suicide. Joel tells her it is a man called Robert who murdered someone and is in prison now.

Rose wants to meet him. Joel has no other case and nothing else to do but go out of his way to drive Rose all the way to see Robert.

Rose pretends to be someone who doesn’t have a smiley demon following her. When Robert says he wants to speak to her alone, Joel obeys Rose's orders to leave.

Robert goes on about how the smiley demon was after him and fed on trauma. He realized that the only way out was to kill someone in front of someone to pass on the curse.

Rose is horrified and blurts out that she is incapable of killing anyone. Robert freaks out and tells her to get lost. How dare she brought her smiley demon germs to the prison?

Rose leaves and Joel keeps pestering her about what Robert said. She tries to keep it all a secret.

She goes home and we wonder if she is going to break more glasses. Trevor is not going to be picking it up, though.

She sees Madeline through the window and lets her in. While they are chatting, Rose gets a call from Madeline.

But...isn’t Madeline sitting right across from her?

Nope. That's not Madeline. The person sitting across her smiles creepily.

Rose freaks out and decides she is going to turn to murder after all. She goes to work where she seeks out Carl.

She provokes him and then as he freaks out, she starts stabbing him. Dr Desai comes over and screams.

Rose turns to him and sees Dr Desai tearing off his face.

It's all a dream. Rose has some pretty vivid dreams. Just then Dr Desai comes and when he sees an upset Rose, he shows concern. And even more so when he sees the knife.

Rose panics and drives away. She takes a long drive on a lonely road and calls Joel. She tells him she needs to isolate herself so that the demon cannot play tricks with her.

Trevor doesn't bother to call. He's washed his hands on the whole mess.

Rose goes back to her childhood home and it is obvious she should have put it up for sale than deal with this creepy property.

She goes in and soon enough the smiley demon shows up. This time disguised as her mother.

The mother complains about Rose abandoning her and letting her die rather than call for help. Rose argues that her mother was vicious towards her. The demon turns taller and chases her about. Rose manages to set the whole house on fire and runs out.

She's safe now. The demon is dead. She goes to Joel and talks about her emotional boundaries. Joel gives her a creepy smile.

It's all a trick. Rose and her dreams...

Rose is still in the house. The demon finds her and tears off its face. The demon has several smiling mouths and several teeth. It also has a big mouth.

The demon opens its mouth and swallows Rose. She is ready after all. She is exhausted and traumatized, just the way the demon prefers in his meals.

He stretches her mouth and climbs inside her. The effects are a bit off but okay, we get the gist of what is happening.

Joel comes to be a hero. He realizes somehow that Rose must be at her childhood home. He breaks open the door and finds Rose standing with her back to him.

The next instant she is having a bath with kerosene and turning around to smile creepily at Joel. Then she sets herself on fire.

Joel watches horrified. The flames reflect in his eyes.

That's what he gets for going after an ex. Now he is cursed.

Should there be a sequel, he is going to pass on the curse to someone else.

The movie ends.

Smile was a decent horror movie, though it has nothing new to offer and longer than it should have been.

SCARE SCALE: 3/5

Check out this movie on Amazon Prime Video