The First Encounter

Inside a psychiatric ward in Newark, New Jersey, therapist Rose Cotter was assigned to evaluate a distressed graduate student named Laura Weaver. Laura, visibly terrified, recounted witnessing her professor commit suicide days earlier. She insisted that an unseen force was stalking her—an Entity that took the form of people with eerie, forced smiles. Despite Rose’s efforts to calm her, Laura’s panic escalated. Then, without warning, she went still, smiled unnaturally, and slit her own throat with a shard of porcelain as Rose watched in horror.

The Spiral Begins

The following day, Rose returned to work, still haunted by what she had seen. During a session with a patient named Carl, she believed she saw him smiling in the same disturbing way and warning her of her impending death. But the moment nurses arrived, it became clear Carl had been asleep the entire time. Rose’s supervisor, Dr. Morgan Desai, became concerned and ordered her to take time off.

Soon after, Rose’s sense of reality began to deteriorate. Hallucinations and intrusive thoughts consumed her. Her fiancé, Trevor, grew distant, while others around her began doubting her stability. Rose visited her old therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott, who suggested unresolved trauma from her childhood—when Rose witnessed her mentally ill mother’s overdose—might be resurfacing under stress.

Unfolding the Pattern

Rose attempted to maintain normalcy by attending her nephew Jackson’s birthday party. She gifted him a toy train, but when he unwrapped it, the body of her missing cat, Mustache, was inside the box. Guests screamed. Rose saw a partygoer smiling eerily at her, causing her to fall backward through a glass table. The incident reinforced her belief that she was cursed by the same supernatural force that haunted Laura.

Digging deeper, Rose traced Laura’s last days and discovered that her professor had been acting strangely before his death. Laura had witnessed his suicide after he too had encountered someone who died violently. Rose asked her ex-boyfriend Joel, now a detective, for access to police records. They uncovered a disturbing sequence of connected suicides—each victim having witnessed another suicide within days of their own, all involving that same disturbing smile.

A Desperate Search for Meaning

Tensions escalated when Trevor arranged an intervention without Rose’s consent, involving Dr. Northcott. Feeling betrayed, Rose turned to her sister Holly for comfort. But Holly dismissed her fears and accused her of unraveling just like their mother had. In return, Rose accused her of abandoning the family.

Further investigation revealed one man had survived the cycle: a convicted murderer named Robert Talley. When Rose and Joel visited him in prison, he explained the Entity fed on trauma, transferring itself from person to person through witnessed suicides. His only escape had been to kill a stranger in front of a witness, thereby passing on the curse. Rose, appalled, rejected his method. When Talley realized she was cursed, he panicked and demanded she leave.

The Illusion of Control

Back home, Rose attempted to reclaim control by confronting her trauma. She hallucinated a session with Dr. Northcott, only to realize the Entity had assumed her identity. Overwhelmed, she drove to the hospital, convinced she had to kill someone to end the cycle. She imagined stabbing Carl in front of Dr. Desai. But when she awoke in her car, the knife still in hand, Desai was peering in. She sped off before he could intervene.

Realizing self-isolation was her only ethical option, Rose drove to her abandoned childhood home. She prepared to die alone, believing this would starve the Entity of trauma. In the empty house, the Entity returned—this time in the guise of her mother. It forced her to relive the night of the overdose, when young Rose had refused to help. A violent struggle ensued, culminating in Rose setting the house on fire and escaping.

The Final Betrayal

Outside, she returned to Joel’s apartment, hoping for comfort. But when he smiled with that familiar, inhuman grin, she realized she was still trapped in a hallucination. In reality, Joel had tracked her phone to the house and arrived outside. Inside, the Entity’s true form emerged—tall and skinless, with layered jaws inside a wide, grotesque smile. Rose, transfixed, succumbed to the creature as it climbed inside her body.

When Joel forced the door open, he found her already consumed. Smiling and doused in kerosene, she set herself on fire before his eyes. He screamed, helpless to intervene, as the curse passed on to him—the next link in a horrific chain.