Rose Cotter

**Rose Cotter** was the main protagonist of the 2022 American psychological horror film *Smile*. She is portrayed by Sosie Bacon as an adult, and Meghan Brown Pratt as a 10 year-old.

## History

At a psychiatric ward, therapist Dr. Rose Cotter meets with Laura Weaver, a graduate student who witnessed her art history professor die by suicide several days earlier. Not long after Laura arrives at the psych ward, she stumbles to the floor and begins screaming. After Rose calls for help, she sees Laura standing up and smiling. With a shard of a broken vase, Laura kills herself by slitting her throat. Rose later sees her manic patient Carl Renken smiling and shouting to her that she's going to die. Rose calls for nurses to restrain him, only to see he was asleep the whole time. Concerned for Rose's mental well-being, her supervisor Dr. Morgan Desai gives her a week off.

With each passing day, Rose's hallucinations continue, making Rose seem unhinged and dangerous to people around her, including her fiancé Trevor and sister Holly. At her nephew's birthday party, Rose's gift had been replaced by her dead cat, horrifying the children. She then sees a party attendant smiling at her and falls onto a glass table, ending the party in chaos. She eventually visits her former therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott, who suggests that her problems stem from her abusive and mentally ill mother, whose death from an overdose, she witnessed as a child. Rose begins to suspect she has been cursed by some sort of supernatural entity but is unable to get Trevor to believe her.

Eventually, Rose learns that Laura's professor was grinning at her before his death, Rose visits his widow Victoria Muñoz and learns he became increasingly unstable after witnessing a woman die by suicide several days prior to his death. Rose subsequently asks her ex-boyfriend Joel, a police detective, to go through police records. The two exes eventually find several cases in common where someone witnessed a suicide, then a few days later died by suicide in front of someone else, who continued the pattern.

Later, Rose visits Holly and attempts to explain the situation she is currently in, but it only further strains their relationship. The hallucinations continue to escalate in intensity. Joel eventually calls her, revealing that he discovered all the witnesses died by suicide within a week. The exception was Robert Talley, who instead murdered someone else.

Rose and Joel visit Robert in jail, where the latter claims the entity feeds on trauma, and the only way to escape it is to kill someone in front of a witness in a brutal enough fashion to cause major psychological trauma, passing the entity to them. Rose angrily rejects the option and unintentionally reveals to the prisoner that she is being haunted by The Monstrosity. Robert yells at her to leave, as he doesn't want it come back to him.

She is subsequently confronted at home by the entity in Madeline's form, where it gleefully warns her that she's running out of time. Rose impulsively drives to her hospital with a knife and hallucinates murdering Carl in front of Morgan to pass the entity to him. She snaps out of it and hastily drives away, though not before Morgan spots the knife and alerts the police.

Rose drives to her abandoned family home, convinced that she can't pass on the entity if she remains alone. Rose confronts the entity in the form of her mother, where it is revealed that as a child, Rose had fearfully ignored her pleas for help after she overdosed and accidentally left her to die. The entity attacks Rose, but she seemingly manages to set it on fire; destroying the entity and fleeing the burning house in the process. Then, she seemingly drives to Joel's apartment, where he comforts her. However, it is when Joel starts smiling, that Rose realizes everything that happened from the moment she entered her old house was a hallucination.

As the real Joel pulls up, having tracked Rose's phone, Rose believes that he is either the entity or its next victim and runs screaming into the house and shuts the door, locking Joel out and locking herself in with the entity. The entity approaches the now despairing Rose and immediately rips off its own skin to reveal its true form - a towering, skinless humanoid with multiple sets of teeth and gums nested within an enormous, smiling mouth. Rose is subsequently paralyzed after seeing its visage, which allows the entity to force itself inside her body through her mouth. Joel breaks down the front door only to see a smiling Rose set herself on fire, with the entity subsequently passing onto him.

## Quotes

* "This isn't real! You're not real!" - Rose to The Monstrosity
* "I came to you, the person I'm supposed to trust most in the world, and I confided that I was scared to death. That I needed you. And you just didn't even listen to a word I was saying." - Rose to Trevor, Rose's fiancé

## Trivia

* After discovering that she could save herself from the curse by killing someone else, Rose returns to her apartment. The camera angle reveals a piece of mail that says “Last Chance” beside the doorway. This was an intentional bit of production design to correspond with Rose’s ultimatum.

## References

1. ↑ ‘Smile’ – Six Things We Learned from the Blu-ray’s Commentary Track - Bloody Disgusting