Parker Finn's Smile stands out as one of the best horror movies of 2022, in part because it leaves audiences still curious about the villainous entity and why it makes its victims flash a grin before killing them. Based on Finn's short film Laura Hasn't Slept, the horror feature Smile serves as a metaphor for trauma and how it can become all-consuming. The movie borrows popular tropes from other horrors, such as The Ring and Truth or Dare, to tell its story yet also brings something entirely new and mysterious to the genre.
Smile follows Rose, a therapist who begins experiencing hallucinations after witnessing one of her patients take their own life. She learns that the patient also saw someone die by suicide, and this pattern dates back for years. It becomes clear that Rose's hallucinations aren't just in her head and that she is being taunted by a virus-like monster, or entity, that breaks its victims down before possessing them and using their bodies to kill them in front of a nearby witness. Serving as an allegory for how trauma can be ed onto other people, the entity then claims the witness as its next victim, with the cycle only able to be broken if the person infected murders someone.
What Does The Entity Really Want In Smile?
The entity in Smile is powered by psychological trauma and thrives from feeding off of people's pain. Smile improves on other movies of its kind when it comes to demonic forces because it doesn't need to possess a vessel in order to maintain its strength, with its virus-like nature making it difficult to beat. It could be theorized that due to its difference in behavior, Smile's entity is a collector of souls, quickly consuming its victims and moving to the next, only gaining more strength with each one. A moment between Rose and the entity in Smile s this theory, as it tells Rose that she will stay with it forever.
Above all else, the entity's symbolic nature shows the difficulties of overpowering the mind. Smile's entity is able to make Rose see things no one else can and even presents a sadistic mirage to her. This leads to Smile's dark twist ending where the entity makes her believe that she defeated it and had actually returned home. The movie's villainous entity uses the way in which trauma spreads from one person to another as a way of ensuring that it can overpower Rose and its previous victims, as they all eventually succumb to this monster in the end.
Why Does The Entity Make Its Victims Smile?
The most disturbing thing about the entity in the movie is how it makes its victims smile before forcing them to take their own lives. Additionally, all the other times that the entity appears in Smile, it is baring the exact same sinister grin while disguised as someone else. Given the movie's prevalent themes regarding mental health, the smile serves as an allegory for how the most typical way to deal with emotional pain is to smile at the world rather than face any inner demons. Therefore, Smile's entity makes its victims grin and bear it as a way of further mocking the pain in which they are going through, and the universal response humans have to mental health.
