Smile (R)
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streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; Hulu; Paramount+; Vudu; YouTube

This 2022 film is a follow-up to the 2020 short film Laura Hasn't Slept. Early in the movie, a therapist named Rose Cotter, who works in a hospital psychiatric ward, meets a young woman named Laura Weaver, the protagonist of the short film. Laura is extremely agitated, and tells Rose about an entity that appears as various smiling people, who only she can see, and who is eventually going to kill her. Rose tries to calm her down, but Laura's mental state only gets worse, because Rose doesn't believe that what Laura is experiencing is real. Suddenly, Laura starts screaming, but then stops and smiles an eerie smile, and cuts her own throat.

The experience leaves Rose unsettled, and she begins seeing things, herself. Her boss, Dr. Morgan Desai (Kal Penn), orders her to take a week off to get her head together. But things only get worse and worse for Rose, leading to concern from her fiancé, Trevor, and her former therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott. They both believe her current mental state is tied to the suicide of her mother, when she was a child, and rather understandably can't believe that the things Rose is seeing are real. Eventually she gets help from her ex-boyfriend, a cop named Joel, and they trace a long line of suicides just like Laura's, in which the curse is passed on to a witness of the suicide. They find one man who survived the curse, by killing someone else, which of course Rose is unwilling to do.

I don't want to spoil any more details of the plot, and I'm certainly not going to say how it all ends. But the whole movie is deeply disturbing, and the psychological horror is done incredibly effectively. There's also a supernatural element, which itself is pretty scary, but it's the psychological aspect that really makes the film work as well as it does. I really felt Rose's deepening desperation and terror, and sympathized with her.

Followed by "Smile 2"