Woman Burns Childhood Home Because People Smile Creepily at Her 🥲

I've loved horror movies my whole life, but I still just got around to watching this one last year but why even did I start with that. Moving swiftly away from that and to the film, the plot follows Dr. Rose who witnesses a wild and traumatic incident involving one of her patients. After this, she begins to experience scary and unexplainable events until she realizes that the only way out is to face her own troubled past. The message here is pretty clear; Go To Therapy (or stay away from balanced human beings). Want to know "why do people's smiles make some individuals uncomfortable?" I also would like to know that.

And so the review begins...

Rose gets a patient one day, but this is not a normal patient (none of her patients are normal though, she's a therapist but this one is a lot less normal than the rest.) The patient's name is Laura, who is terrified and says that says that she's the victim of a violent haunting entity that forces people to self-delete after they smile at her. Right then and there, she becomes the villain that torments her and goes silent, smiling a creepy smile as she slits her throat with a shard of glass that she found *somewhere...

Tag, Rose; you're it!

Rose begins to see creepy smiles on the faces of the people around her all the time, but she chalks it up to the trauma of the event she just experienced. To be fair, smiles are generally creepy and unsettling, but people who ask others to smile are a lot creepier. Will an eventual instalment of this film turn the tables in this way and see the protagonist facing down a horror that really wants to see them smile? Guess we'll see...

Well, the visions keep coming and they don't stop coming, Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running, didn't make sense not to live for fun, your head gets smart but your brain gets dumb... Hey now, you're a schizo, in a movie, with ghosts etc.

With some research, Rose discovers that there were other individuals affected by the same occurrences and who died in a sort of chain reaction. This is enough reason to retrieve an ex from the archives, so Rose finds hers who is a detective and can't wait to help. They learn a lot about the cases, which is what everyone's known for a minute- that the entity is contagious and is passed from one person to the next in the fatal ritual that's the theme of this movie. They also learn about an individual who survived the curse but took someone else's life.

Isolation Is the Solution

So Rose practices social distancing to avoid passing her sinister condition to someone else. Obviously, her legion of fans doesn't like this behavior, and so she stops one problem but creates a dozen, smaller problems. Remember when I told you that therapy is worthwhile? Here's an example in action: Rose realizes that the childhood memory that haunts her, of finding her mother at 0 HP by her own hand, might be her link to the entity haunting her. Bad news, she's been supressing that pain . Medium-level news, she might be able to break the curse if she confronts her painful past.

Rose finds the person who survived the haunting before and asks him what the deal is. He says that the entity feeds on fear and trauma and that the only way to break the cursed cycle is for a current host to die without any witnesses present. That's a tall order if you ask me. She takes this advice and heads to a cabin that used to be her abusive father's, where shockingly, the trauma grows exponentially. Maybe there weren't other cabins to choose from but I personally would not have picked that one. While she's there, the entity torments her non-stop but her ex (maybe he's a w at this point though) gets worried about her and goes to find her.

Wrong move because the moment he walks into the cabin, the entity possesses Laura and forces her to smile creepily. She chooses to go out in a blaze of glory by setting herself on fire in front of Joel, who unfortunately picks up the supernatural infection on the spot. The movie ends in similar fashion to how it started, with a lot of pain and confusion as to why in actual hell? Why?

What Did We Learn?

Nothing because learning sucks. All the same, we see representations of the effects of mental health, trauma, and possible pipelines to psychological distress and harm. If you want to get deep with this film, you could think about the way in which the curse is transmuted from one person to another. The smile and final-level trauma dump are just representations in the movie of the way in which hurt can be spread around and cause a lot of damage. We can deduce that the only way to deal with mental issues is to face them and seek professional help. Trying to solve them by yourself, the way Rose from the movie attempted to help by isolating herself, may only cause more problems for you and the people around you.

We also see some imagery of what it could look like to get too close to someone who has mental health hardships. While it may be with the best of intention, trying to help someone when you're not actually equipped to offer the help isn't the safest thing to do. Teamwork makes the dream work so the best way to help is to find professional help for them. Just as there's a danger of being physically overpowered when trying to pull someone out of a hole, the same risks apply to mental issues as well. This is important to remember because mental complications will generally not have any physical signs.

I would rate this movie a 5/10 because it didn't give me my 13th reason which is what a good horror movie should do. This took a sombre turn, but on the bright side, you know what to do the next time someone smiles at you...