“Smile” is a horror movie that begins when Rose, a therapist working at a hospital, visits a patient who was brought in for having a breakdown in public. The girl had witnessed a professor brutally kill himself four days before, and she claimed that the professor killed himself with a smile. She is completely terrified because she is seeing a monster that wears other people’s faces and smiles. The patient claims that the monster is going to kill her, and then becomes hysterical and crawls away as she says that the monster is there in the room. Rose sees nothing, but when she turns back to the patient she has stood up and is smiling with a shard of glass in her hand. The patient gruesomely kills herself in front of Rose while smiling the entire time.

That night, Rose sees a hallucination of the dead patient smiling in her house. The next day she goes back to the hospital and while checking in on another of her patients, sees him stand up, smile, and repeat that she is going to die. As the next days progress Rose hears strange things and hallucinates people smiling at her. When she gives her nephew a present on his birthday, he opens it to find Rose’s dead cat that had gone missing the previous night, but Rose only remembers wrapping a train toy.

This movie is one of the creepiest and most uncanny things I have ever watched. I didn’t even finish the movie because I watched it alone at night and got so anxious that I googled the ending and decided I didn’t want to see that. The music, sound effects, and visuals were so foreboding and apprehensive.

The smiling creature/monster/demon is a doppelganger because it shapeshifts into people and mimics humans. The smiling effect on human faces is extremely uncanny, because you know there is something wrong and inhuman about it subconsciously. Watching someone kill themselves while widely smiling is also very creepy and unsettling. Maybe it’s so uncanny because a smile, a friendly human expression, is subverted into something threatening. I think Rose also experiences the double consciousness effect because no one believes that the monster is terrorizing her, they believe that she is going insane just like her mother did.

Trigger Warnings: suicide, self harm, gore, death