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Smile ending explained: What Rose's fate means for the upcoming sequel

Here's everything you need to know about the horror hit's chilling conclusion ahead of the highly anticipated new movie.

Paramount Pictures/Paramount +

Smile pulled off one of the creepiest viral marketing campaigns in recent memory. In the lead-up to the film’s 2022 release, actors were stationed at major events, like baseball games, with eerie smiles plastered across their faces. That unnerving visual, broadcast on national TV, made filmgoers curious about the movie behind the grin — and Smile did not disappoint.

Director Parker Finn told Entertainment Weekly in 2022 that he “wanted to set out to make something that… feels like a sustained panic attack from start to finish.” He succeeded. Through strong marketing and word-of-mouth, the film far exceeded expectations, topping the box office in its first two weekends en route to a $217 million worldwide haul.

Smile centers around psychotherapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), the latest unlucky recipient of a curse that gets transmitted via suicide. Rose witnesses a new patient — frantic and terrified one minute, placid and dead-eyed the next — take her own life right in front of her, a haunting smile never leaving the disturbed young woman’s face. From there, what Rose believed to be the patient’s paranoid ramblings became all too real.

A malevolent entity has attached itself to her, one that seems to lead inexorably to suicide before infecting the next victim. It haunts Rose relentlessly, appearing at random in public and in private. It even takes on the form of familiar faces, gradually revealing itself with the uncurling of that conspicuous smile, embedding itself further into her being with each appearance. Given that the time from infection to death usually takes about a week, Rose finds herself in a race against time to break the cycle.

Paramount Pictures/Paramount +

While Smile was popular with audiences, its finale left fans divided — and curious. Read on for Smile ’s ending explained, plus what’s possibly in store for the highly anticipated sequel.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Smile.

Why does the entity appear as Rose's mother?

Throughout Smile , the entity acts as a metaphor for unresolved trauma, which gets passed from one person to the next. In the final act, this metaphor becomes more literal when the entity manifests as Rose’s deceased mother.

Near the end, Rose realizes that to outsmart the curse, she needs to be alone with no witnesses for whatever might happen. She thus returns to her abandoned family home — the site of her mother’s death. By this point in the film, we know that Rose was present for her mother’s passing as a child and remains haunted by it.

Once she’s inside the house, the entity takes on the form of her mother and taunts her with accusations. Rose’s mama trauma goes deeper than the death itself; as we discover in a brief flashback, her mother was emotionally abusive, and when the moment came, young Rose made the choice not to call for help when her mom was on her literal deathbed.

Now, while attempting to save her own life, Rose tries to remind herself that none of this is real. The entity counters: “Your mind makes it real.” As if to prove its point, it then transforms into a giant, misshapen, monstrous version of her mother and attacks. In the struggle, our heroine defiantly sets the creature — and the house — ablaze, consuming both the curse and the guilt it represents and allowing Rose to escape.

What happens when Rose escapes the house?

Believing she has triumphed over the curse, Rose leaves the burning wreckage behind, confident she can return to her normal life unburdened by fear or emotional baggage. She returns to see her ex-boyfriend Joel ( Kyle Gallner ), the only person who knows what she’s been up against and will hear her out.

She goes to his apartment for solace and asks him to stay with her. “Yeah, of course I’ll stay with you,” he replies “…I’ll stay with you forever.” And then he smiles that smile. Rose realizes her victory was an illusion; she didn’t escape the house, or the creature, after all.

Walter Thomson/Paramount Pictures/Paramount +

When she comes to, she’s outside her home again, and Joel — the real Joel — has followed her. She runs inside, locks him out of the house, and stares down her ultimate fate.

Does Rose survive in the end?

No. In the film’s boldest surreal flourish, the entity — still in its monstrous maternal form — conquers Rose once and for all. It peels off its face to reveal a skinless, semi-humanoid monster with multiple sets of jaws nesting within an enormous, smiling mouth. It crawls inside a catatonic Rose, now reduced to a mere vessel.

Joel eventually breaks down the door, only to find a smiling Rose dousing herself in gasoline. She lights a match and goes up in flames, presumably passing the curse onto him.

In strictly narrative terms, the ending ties into an enduring horror tradition; whether it’s a supernatural entity ( It Follows ), a curse ( The Ring ), or fate itself ( Final Destination ), the lethal force will always be unstoppable. The survival of the entity in Smile is, frankly, inevitable.

But the ending also sparked debate, particularly over its treatment of mental illness. Some fans viewed Rose’s death as a tragic commentary on the difficulty of overcoming trauma, while others felt the film’s depiction of her struggle was too bleak and nihilistic.

“I like complex, messy, sometimes ambiguous endings that can stir debate,” Finn said in an interview with The Latch . “With the themes and motifs that we were working with, I didn’t wanna do anything easy, or neat or tidy, so it all kind of went back to what we were exploring.”

What does Smile 's ending mean for the sequel?

Smile ’s success meant a sequel was highly probable. It didn’t take long before Smile 2 was announced. The new movie hits theaters on Oct. 18, 2024, just over two years after the original arrived. Gallner will return as Joel, though the trailer reveals the story primarily revolves around a world-famous pop star played by Naomi Scott , the entity’s latest target. If nothing else, that could set up several possibilities for conceptually expanding the franchise and its mythology.

“If there was to be more Smile ,” Finn told The Latch, “I’d wanna make sure that it’s not just a repeat of this film; it’d have to be something really unexpected with a bunch of surprises up its sleeve.”

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‘Smile’ Review: The Demons Grin Back at You in a Horror Movie With a Highly Effective Creep Factor

A therapist looks like she's losing her mind in a shocker that puts a happy face on trauma.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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“ Smile ” is a horror film that sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits. In an emergency psych ward, Dr. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon ), a diligent and devoted therapist, is speaking to a woman who sounds like her soul went to hell and never made it back. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stasey), and she describes, in tones that remain rational despite her tremulous panic, the visions she’s been seeing that no one else can.

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The smile, as a signifier of maniacal fear, goes back a long way. Just think of Jack-’o-lanterns and the Joker, or the leer that flashed across the mottled face of Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil, or the rictus grins in a movie like “Insidious” or the movie that inspired it, the great 1962 low-budget freak-show classic “Carnival of Souls.” In “Smile,” the first-time writer-director Parker Finn, drawing on films like “Hereditary” and “It Follows” and “The Strangers,” turns the human smile into a spooky vector of the shadow world of evil. The movie has a shivery quality that I, for one, thought “Black Phone” lacked. Yet I wish “Smile” were more willing to be…suggestive.

If you’re haunted by visions of people smiling at you, but no one else sees them, the world is going to think you’re crazy, and much of the drama in “Smile” revolves around Rose looking like a therapist who’s lost her mind. Sosie Bacon, who’s like a taut neurasthenic Geneviève Bujold, creates an impressive spectrum of anxiety, tugging the audience into her nightmare. It makes sense that Rose, teaming up with her police-officer ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), turns herself into an investigator, because that’s what therapists are (at least the good ones). And she’s got a primal trauma of her own: the suicide of her mother, which we glimpse in the film’s opening moments. “Smile” lifts, from “Hereditary,” the idea that the emotional and psychological demons that are passed down through families are our own real-life ghosts. But in this case it’s a megaplex metaphor: literal, free of nuance, illustrated (at the climax) with a demon who sheds her skin, all the better to get inside yours.

There’s a good scene set at Rose’s nephew’s seventh birthday party, where the usual tuneless singing of “Happy Birthday” melts the film into a trance, and the kid unwraps a present that stops the party dead in its tracks. But I would have liked to see three more scenes this dramatic — especially in a movie that lasts 115 minutes. “Smile” will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie. (And why is “Lollipop,” the 1958 hit by the Chordettes, played over the closing credits? It’s one of my favorite songs, but it has zero connection to anything in the movie.) Yet let’s give “Smile” credit for taking a deep dive into the metaphysics of smile horror. The nature of a smile is that it draws you into a connection with the person who’s smiling. That’s why the forces who come after Rose are more than just bogeywomen. That’s why it feels like they’re meant for her.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, Sept. 26, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 115 MIN.

Production: A Paramount Pictures release, in association with Paramount Players, of a Temple Hill Entertainment production. Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Robert Salerno. Executive producer: Adam Fishbach.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Parker Finn. Camera: Charlie Sarroff. Editor: Eeliott Greenberg. Music: Cristobal “Christo” Tapia de Veer.
With: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Robert Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan.

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‘Smile’ Review: Parker Finn’s Supernatural Take on Trauma Will Make You Grimace and Grin

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The phrase “ smile through the pain” takes on a menacing new meaning in “Smile,” as Parker Finn uses an internationally recognized symbol of happiness to elicit fear and evil as part of the film’s exploration of trauma. A smile is nothing more than a mask, and the real horror arises from the true intention behind it.

Sosie Bacon stars as Rose Cotter, a doctor who works in an emergency psychiatric unit and has carried a heavy burden since she witnessed her mother’s suicide at ten years old. Her mental health begins to deteriorate after she assesses a young woman named Laura (Caitlin Stasey) who is brought in for witnessing a suicide. Frantic and begging for someone to believe her, Laura tells Rose that she is being taunted by a being that only she can see; one that smiles and changes its appearance all while delivering a death threat. She then kills herself right in front of a frozen Rose, who later discovers that whatever entity influenced this patient has now latched itself onto her.

Finn fleshes out Rose’s character with backstories and glimpses into the relationships with her boss, her mother, her fiance, and her older sister. Rose’s emotional turmoil is visually engrossing as a result of Bacon’s impressively frenetic performance. As Rose grapples with disturbing hallucinations and the inability to trust those around her, she fluctuates between moments of mania and disconnection. This spectrum of vulnerable paranoia and fear allows Finn to tackle the multilayered complexity of mental health as Rose attempts to convince those around her that what she is experiencing is real.

While this is a tiresome (although realistic) trope in horror, these rapidly changing emotional states allow Bacon’s acting to shine. Feeling alone, despite the care from her therapist (Robin Weigert), Rose finds a sliver of solace in a police officer and former flame, Joel (Kyle Gallner), who helps her piece together the unsettling lineage of this supernatural being’s victims. While the specifics of the monster are hidden, its execution method and purpose are both revealed within a storyline that is sadly traditional and insipid in its structure.

In order to convey Rose’s mental and emotional downward spiral, Finn utilizes an array of strong camera angles that suggest the lack of consistency in her newfound reality. Slowly rotating the camera ninety degrees, inverting the camera completely upside down, invasive close-up shots on the characters’ faces, and beautiful aerial shots all provide an ominous tone with the eerie feeling of being studied and hunted.

The minimalist production design, courtesy of Lester Cohen, focuses on the horrific mental state of its characters instead of painting a typical horror film aesthetic with gothic or dark features. However, there are certain color palettes that nicely symbolize the instability of Rose’s inner mind and physical surroundings. For example, the hospital where she works dons light pink walls (a nod to an old study that found the shade Bake-Miller Pink to reduce aggression) while Rose often wears blue outfits, a color often representing sadness

The plot of “Smile” is exhaustingly reminiscent of other horror predecessors such as “It Follows,” “The Ring,” “Oculus,” and even “Final Destination.” Finn elaborates on a contagious approach to death by factoring in trauma and how grief and depression can have a ripple effect, but the story does not entirely feel like its own beast. To enhance the film’s already heavily pronounced themes, composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer creates a strong soundscape of playfulness and dread which perfectly compliments the juxtaposition used throughout the film’s 116 minute running time.

The sound design and music are as unnerving as the graphic death scenes, but unfortunately come with excessive amounts of jump scares. And the special effects team from Amalgamated Dynamics constructs truly searing imagery that will both shock and delightfully disgust, especially in the third act. Their grisly prosthetic work and creative monster design have a corporeal surrealism which will have horror fans grinning from ear to ear.

“Smile” navigates unhealed trauma through a supernatural lens and mischievous juxtaposition, despite feeling like a shadow of other stories. With rare moments of dark comedy and irony, he is able to expose the forceful nature of society’s expectation to be happy and presentable despite the suffering that may lurk under one’s skin. Overall, “Smile” delivers a captivating and claustrophobic mental hellscape that will cause one to both grimace and grin.

Paramount will release “Smile” in theaters on Friday, September 30.