Is Smile Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

A new patient with a lot to say and a short appointment

Rose Cotter, a therapist on a Newark psychiatric ward in New Jersey, meets a new patient, Laura Weaver, a PhD student who recently watched her professor kill himself. Laura says an invisible entity now torments her, that it shows up as menacing smiling people, and that it has predicted her death. She starts screaming and choking, and Rose calls for help. Then Laura goes calm, smiles and slits her own throat in front of Rose. This is the scene people dread most and it comes right at the start. Later that night, Rose sees Laura in her own dark kitchen, smiling.

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A birthday present nobody asked for

The next day another patient, Carl, gives her the same smile and yells that she will die. Rose calls for nurses to restrain him and then realizes Carl has been asleep all along. Her supervisor, Morgan, sends her home for a week. Her hallucinations keep getting worse, and her former therapist Madeline links them to Rose's childhood, when she watched her abusive, mentally ill mother die of an overdose. Rose buys a toy train for her nephew Jackson, whose mother is Rose's older sister Holly, as a birthday gift. At the party he opens the box and finds the body of Mustache, Rose's cat. Rose then sees a guest smiling at her, falls into a glass coffee table and hurts herself. She decides she has been cursed, while Holly and her fiance Trevor think she has inherited her mother's mental health problems.

The only man who got away from it

Rose learns that Laura's professor was smiled at before his suicide, and his widow Victoria tells her the professor had seen someone take their own life shortly before he did. Her ex-boyfriend Joel, a police detective, looks through old records with her and they find a chain of people who watched someone smile and die, then did the same within a week. One man breaks the chain: Robert Talley, a convicted murderer. In prison he tells them an entity feeds on trauma, and the only escape is to brutally kill someone in front of a witness so the curse passes to the witness. When he realizes Rose is cursed, he screams at them to leave. Rose is then terrorized by the Entity disguised as Madeline coming for a session. She drives to the hospital with a knife and tries to kill Carl in front of Morgan, but this turns out to be a hallucination. She wakes in her car with Morgan standing outside, drives off, and he, having noticed the knife, alerts the police.

Home is where the mother is

Rose drives to her abandoned family home. She believes that if she isolates herself, the curse cannot spread. The Entity appears as her mother, and Rose learns she could have saved her mother and chose not to. The Entity attacks her, Rose starts a fire in the struggle and it seems to kill the Entity, and she runs out and goes to Joel's apartment. Then Joel smiles at her out of nowhere, and she realizes it is another vision. The real Joel has traced her phone to the old house and found her outside it. Rose understands what is about to happen and runs back in.