Smile (2022)

At a glance

Director	Parker Finn
Release year	2022
Runtime	115 minutes
Genre	Supernatural horror
Starring	Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner

Plot

Rose Cotter is a therapist in a psychiatric emergency ward. A patient, Laura, tells her that something is following her and wearing other people’s smiles. Laura kills herself in front of Rose, still smiling. Rose starts to see the same smile on colleagues, on strangers, and on people who are not in the room. She has a few days. The pattern, once she finds it, is a chain of witnesses.

The entity feeds on trauma and moves to the person who watched. Rose’s own history, her mother’s death, is the door it uses. The film is a curse story told as a breakdown, and it does not offer a clean clinical explanation at the end.

Production

Parker Finn expanded his short Laura Hasn’t Slept into the feature. Paramount bought it and released it on September 30, 2022, after a marketing campaign that put the smile on people at baseball games. Sosie Bacon plays Rose. The budget was about $17 million. The worldwide gross was about $217 million. Smile 2, with a new lead, opened in 2024. Finn directed both.

The grin was a practical direction more than a digital face: actors holding a wrong expression. Cristobal Tapia de Veer wrote the score. The film’s hospital and house locations do the ordinary work of a studio horror film. The chain of deaths is the mythology. Finn has said the short was about a nightmare, and the feature is about what a job in trauma does to the person listening.

Cast

Sosie Bacon as Rose Cotter
Jessie T. Usher as Trevor
Kyle Gallner as Joel
Robin Weigert as Dr. Madeline Northcott
Caitlin Stasey as Laura Weaver
Kal Penn as Dr. Morgan Desai

Trivia

The film grew out of the short Laura Hasn’t Slept. Stasey plays Laura in both.
Bacon is the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. The film does not use that as a joke.
The marketing put smiling people in the stands at a baseball game. The stunt sold the image before the plot.
The entity needs a witness. That is the rule the sequel also uses.
Smile 2 follows a pop star, not Rose.
The score by Tapia de Veer is as unsettled as the grin.