Headscratchers / Smile (2022)

• Was the anger of the college professor's wife real or a hallucination by the Entity? This troper can't think of why she'd suddenly fly into a rage at Rose describing the same thing happening to her.
  • She realised that Rose had a hidden agenda for being there and wanted her gone.
• If the cursed person commits suicide on their own terms with no witnesses before the entity has a chance to take them over, would that possibly break the curse? Leaving the entity with no one to latch on to?
  • That's likely to be your first, best and ONLY way of stopping the curse. As the curse is a literal death sentence. But given the entity's ability to alter your perception of reality, there's no guarantee it would work. Among other things, it tricked Rose into thinking she burned it alive, drove to Joel's house, and started conversing with him. When in reality, she likely never left the living room. Who's to say it can't trick you into thinking you shot yourself in the head? Only for this episode, you'd be stuck with a BLOODY HOLE IN YOUR HEAD, awake, aware and in agonizing pain the whole time. As the entity mocks you and your futile bid to rid yourself of it. But again, other than killing someone with witnesses, what else can you do?
  • Or maybe the way to get rid of it is kill someone in front of a witness and then immediately kill the witness?
  • Or, in a similar twist, the entity could simply linger around the corpse waiting for someone else to stumble across it - after all, even finding the corpse of someone who committed suicide could be considered traumatic, if arguably less acutely so.
  • A solution could be that you must commit the suicide in a place where no one can ever find your body, like burning yourself to ashes so there is no dead body to become traumatised by.
• In each case of suicide portrayed in the film, there is only one witness. But what if there are multiple witnesses? Could the entity duplicate itself by attaching to more than one person? Or does it control the circumstances so that there is always just one witness?
  • I believe it could be the latter, the entity chooses the circumstances of who witnesses it. It probably somehow knows who it wants to latch on to next. Maybe it senses inherent trauma or distress in certain people, and that's how it chooses its next victim.
    • It's mentioned that some of the other victims also had unresolved trauma in their past before witnessing the suicide, so it seems likely the entity has some capacity to find good victims.
• Does the entity require you to have witnessed death before encountering the entity's suicide spree, or not? Laura mentions that she saw her grandfather die when she was young (before the college incident) and Rose saw her mother die (before Laura's suicide). We don't know enough about the college professor to know for sure, but it's not established that he went through anything similar. The same is true of Joel, though, working as a police officer in a city, it's almost guaranteed he would've seen something similar before. Is it just an added bonus, or a necessary part of the process?
  • The professor's wife actually mentions that his brother died in a car accident several years prior to his suicide. The implication seems to be that yes, the entity specifically targets people who've been previously traumatised by a death.
• Given how quickly the curse kills, how has no one in law enforcement or news noticed the pattern? If it took months or years that would make sense, but the Smile has been killing 1-2 people per week in a direct line. Nobody thought that was weird?
  • It seems all the people died of suicide so it would be hard to link all the deaths.
  • The film also expresses how those with mental illnesses are often seen by others as unreliable and are inherently disregarded, as an earlier scene where Rose is talking to the police has an officer callously deride the patient who killed herself as crazy. Rose is also eventually spurned by most of her loved ones with even the only guy who is trying to help her ultimately still not buying into her explanations until its too late. The suicides would likely be dismissed in a similar way, as a bunch of people driven mad by what they'd seen and eventually self-destructing.

---