Mikko Rautalahti

I could see that working for sure! That would be a kind of a conceptual change for the whole film, I think, you'd have to do a lot of structural work for that to land right. But I think that could be really compelling. A kind of a monster vs. monster situation, really. Very cool.

Yeah, I’ve had that experience. Coming from a country where pur relationship to guns is very different, that made me incredibly uncomfortable. Having someone come strapped just to buy some milk and eggs wasn’t cool. I wasn’t scared or threatened, it just felt deeply fucked up.

Anyway, sorry, I know this is long-winded and possibly kind of obnoxious. Obviously Smile did quite well and doesn't need me to fix it, and it's not like I could because they already made the movie.

But, y'know, I'm a writer, I think about this kind of shit all the time. So here we are.

You don't know if she's going to make it. Maybe she will, maybe she won't, but you know she's fighting for her life, and she's fighting for her soul, and she's fighting to die, and they're all the same thing.

And she doesn't make it, ultimately. But she went out on her own terms.

And, look, look, this is a kind of a dick move on my part, I know. I know this is armchair quarterbacking after the fact. I know.

But I think this would have been so much more effective, because you have stakes throughout, the tension remains, and this version of Rose has agency.

Rose is staring off into eternity with unseeing eyes. The moment stretches.

She did it. She fucking made it. This person who stumbled on the scene will never understand it, but we know, WE know that--

A close-up of her lips.

The corner of her mouth twitches.

SMASH CUT TO CREDITS, we're done.

And then her bloody hands lose what strength they had left. Flop down limp. She's done. She's not moving.

The person in the woods -- hunter, Joel, whoever -- arrives on the scene. It's an incredibly disgusting, horrifying, traumatizing tableau, this young woman lying there in a self-inflicted mess.

The demon? Maybe it's in the form of her mother, if we gotta. (Do we? I mean...) Or maybe we just hear it. Maybe it's enough that we know that it's there, holding its breath same as the audience. We sure as shit don't need the CGI.

Rose is so weak. She's trying so fucking hard to die. It's awful.

She has to die. She has to die, or this is all for nothing. The gun is gone, beyond her reach. With incredible conviction and courage, she claws at her wound, trying to do more damage. To speed up her death. If she is found alive, the demon will make the jump and survive. SHE HAS TO END IT.

Now, she can hear distant noise. Somebody calling out. Could be just some random hunter in the woods. Or maybe it's Joel, who has managed to track her down after all. Somebody who heard the gunshot and her scream, and is coming.

Horror in her eyes, as realization dawns.

Rose shoots herself, but because the demon startles her, she botches the job. She does terrible damage, but she's still alive... but dying. She's a bloody, disfigured, gurgling mess, leaking out on the forest floor. Unimaginable pain.

Still, she's laughing. Because fuck you, demon, I won.

Except.

The demon doesn't control her yet. All it can really do, at this stage, is scare her with these terrible visions. So it does that, hoping to keep her from shooting herself.

She sees something -- maybe Joel, maybe her mother if we want to deal with that. It doesn't QUITE work.

So she heads out into the wilderness, into the woods, where there's nobody around. She has brought a gun. And as soon as she judges she's far enough from anybody else, she takes out the gun, racks the slide, and eats a bullet.

Except. The demon, knowing what she's trying to do, intervenes.

She doesn't go to the family house. She does not want to be tracked down. She's distraught and in crisis, but she understands what she has to do. She's smart and driven; she understands her life is over, but she can do one thing, this one fucking horrible thing, to make her death meaningful.

But here's how I would've ended it: so, same as in the movie, Rose realizes that the only thing -- the only moral, ethical thing -- she can do is kill herself by herself, so the demon cannot move on to the next victim.

So she leaves the city, just like in the actual movie. Can't be around people.

So, that's what happens in the movie. And I think I have a way better ending.

I should say that it's easy for me to say this, because unlike the filmmakers, I the luxury of working with hindsight. That makes a HUGE difference. And endings are genuinely just hard. I'm not trying to shit on anybody.

It's underwhelming because the genuinely creepy premise -- "you keep seeing people smiling at you in a super disturbing way and you are having trouble telling reality from hallucination and the clock is ticking" -- is reduced to "then a CGI monster came along and killed you." The tension disappears.

We then cut to Joel, ex-BF/cop, who has tracked Rose to the family house using her cell phone, and he enters just in time to see Rose smile at her in that mega creepy way, as she strikes a match and burns herself alive. Big win for the demon, transfer accomplished! THE END.

Very underwhelming.

A bloody-faced, disfigured monster with a huge mouth full of teeth that contains a huge mouth full of teeth that contains a huge mouth full of teeth.

A huge humanoid monster, about three times the size of a normal human, covered in blood and slimy stuff, crouching in front of Rose. It's... kind of underwhelming.

So turns out she's still in this family home, and now the demon physically manifests. Yay!

It's not awfully executed. It's just that... well. The immense creepiness of that awful smile we've seen earlier is effective. This? This is just a bunch of CGI. The monster squirms its way into Rose's mouth.

The demon shows up as yet another smiling apparition, the house catches on fire, and that kills the demon. Rose is like "yay" and runs to her ex-boyfriend Joel, a cop, and all is well. EXCEPT IT WAS A HALLUCINATION! A shocking twist if you have never seen a horror movie, but... yeah. Well.

In the end, she goes to her abandoned family home with the intention of dying alone so the demon will have nobody to transfer to. Here she hallucinates about a bunch of old family trauma involving her mom (she was dying, Rose could've saved her, but didn't). It's... kinda underwhelming at best.

So! In the film the main character, Rose, gets infected with the demon and starts having an awful time. The clock is ticking; she'll either be driven to suicide, or she has to murder somebody. Both seem like bad options, and her sense of reality begins to fray in a big way. So there's big tension.

A young woman cutting her own throat with a piece of broken pottery, smiling with unsettling intensity.

And of course, the signature of the demon is a creepily intense, relentless smile, featured heavily in terrifying and often quite complex hallucinations that fracture your sanity, and in that moment of suicide, when the demon takes over and initiates the transfer. Hence the name of the movie.

Either way, whether it's suicide or murder, it's the trauma of seeing the victim die in a horrific way that enables the demon to move endlessly from one victim to another. It uses up people, drives them insane, tortures them, and when the time is ripe -- takes about a week -- it finds the next one.

The only way to prevent this is to murder somebody in a shocking manner in front of a witness, which will also cause the demon to jump. That way you'll survive -- but you'll probably be on the hook for the murder, of course, so... not ideal. But at least you'll be alive.

Okay, so, the basic premise of Smile is this: there's a demon, and it will attach itself to you and drive you into insanity and horror. Eventually, it will make you commit a shocking suicide in front of a witness, which will enable the demon to jump over to said witness and begin the cycle again.

A still from the movie Smile, featuring a lady with a smile that could be nice but is actually really damn creepy.

This will involve spoilers, obviously, so if you don't want to know how Smile ends, do not read any further. Fair warning!

I would have to agree with this. Smile sucked. It's a great premise and it has some compelling scenes, but all of that is fucked up by an incredibly lackluster ending that is, frankly, made worse by seeing the monster.

So here's what nobody asked for: "how I would fix Smile so it rocks." (Thread.)

As long as it communicates what's going on to the others in a way that makes sense to them, it's fine! Everybody's got their own style -- which tends to be very dependent on the game and the group and the situation, and it will evolve over the time. It's a rich medium with a lot of room for variety.

It is completely, 100% valid for a player to just say what their character is doing, or thinking, or what they look like. You don't have to do "dialogue," you can say something like "my character says X." As long as it comes from the heart and makes sense in the context, it's all good, it'll work.