![]() The only one who believes Rose is her ex, Joel ( Kyle Gallner), a cop who’s been assigned to Laura’s case. ![]() Desai ( Kal Penn), and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinzer), certainly seem to think the problem is more neurochemical than supernatural-that is, until it’s way too late. The people around Rose, including Trevor, her therapist Dr. The idea that she might not actually be plagued by the same entity that killed Laura, and that her hallucinations, lost time, and emotional volatility might have an internal cause, seems to bother Rose more than the concept of being cursed. Usher) admits that he’s researched inherited mental illness online, and harsh terms like “nutjobs,” “crazies,” and “head cases” are used to describe mentally ill people throughout the film. ![]() That lingering trauma, and the fears and stigma that surround it, form the film’s most intelligent thematic thread: Rose’s fiance Trevor ( Jessie T. This would unsettle anyone, but it especially bothers Rose given that Rose’s own mother died by suicide many years earlier. At the end of the extended dialogue scene that opens the film, Laura turns to Rose with a psychotic grin on her face and proceeds to slit her own throat. “It looks like people, but it’s not a person,” Laura explains, saying that this thing has been following her ever since she witnessed one of her professors bludgeoning himself to death with a hammer four days earlier. That’s where Rose briefly meets Laura ( Caitlin Stasey), a PhD student who’s brought to the psychiatric emergency ward where Rose works, shaking and terrified that something is out to get her. Rose Cotter ( Sosie Bacon) throughout “Smile” likes the taste of people who have witnessed someone else dying by suicide-gruesome, painful, bloody suicide, by garden shears and oncoming trains and the shattered fragments of a ceramic vase in a hospital intake room. Specifically, the vague something that dogs Dr. The difference here is that the monster is barely a metaphor at all: The demon, or evil spirit, or whatever it is-the movie is vague on this point-literally feeds on, and is spread by, trauma. And although it comes on the cusp of a new decade, the new Paramount wide-release horror movie "Smile" fits right in with its PTSD-induced kin. ![]() When the horror histories of the 2010s are written, the decade will be associated with trauma metaphors the way the ‘80s are with slasher movies. ![]()
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