Sweetheart (2019)

Director: JD Dillard

Writers: JD Dillard, Alex Hyer, Alex Theuer

Cast: Kiersey Clemons, Emory Cohen, Hanna Mangan Lawrence, Benedict Samuel

I love the creativity it takes to make a good low budget horror movie, and by “low budget” I don’t mean B-horror—those fun, over the top movies that don’t take themselves seriously and make for an ironically brilliant subgenre of horror. I really do mean small budget films. There’s really an art in making these that bigger budget movies don’t practice, simply because they don’t need to. I have a lot of respect for the indie films that can pull off something beautiful from not very much (my review of Host or The Beach House will tell you that), but sometimes there are movies that just don’t cut it—stories that are trapped on a deserted island with nowhere to go and no hope of staying alive long enough to be found by the audience that flies overhead without any knowledge they’re even there. Such is the unfortunate case with Sweetheart.

In Sweetheart, Jenn (Kiersey Clemons) washes up on an island in the middle of the ocean to find herself alone, left to survive on whatever she can find. After she discovers that there’s a monster hunting her, her fight for survival turns more horrific than she could have imagined. Well…I’ll start by saying this: You know the opening scenes of some horror movies where a throw away character is stalked by and killed by the unseen monster to give us some sense of what’s to come? Make that scene an hour and twenty-two minutes then roll credits. That’s pretty much this movie. It tried to scare me and make me uneasy, but it failed to understand that horror is so much more than a few contrived spooky scenes with nothing in between. Any semblance of depth seemed to have been washed away with the tide here and we’re left with zero exposition until we’re fifty-five minutes in and by then it’s too late to start caring enough about Jenn to make more than a shoulder shrug if she dies (spoiler alert: she lives…but who cares?). Before that, we watch Jenn as she uses her unexplained survivor skills to keep herself alive, all without panicking. Did I mention she watched her friend die when she got washed up onto the beach, then found his body missing from the grave she buried him in, then slept through each night while a monster lurked? I don’t know about you, but I—a normal person (jury’s out on that)—would have been panicking pretty hard the moment I realized I was alone on an island. Everything that happens after that would just make it worse and keep me from sleeping one second. But here’s our heroine, not batting an eye until she sees the monster for herself and in a snap she’s suddenly not a sociopath. Perhaps the first twenty-four minutes should have been spent developing her character instead of trying to give us cheap scares and creeps akin to telling me to close my eyes and put my hand in the bowl of eyeballs that are really just grapes.

I really want to find some positive things to say about this, but honestly, it’s not that easy. From the technical standpoint it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t mind-blowing either. Visually it felt safe and the only risk that was taken was the creature, which would’ve been best left unseen. I would’ve appreciated something like Jaws or Alien, where you don’t really get to see the creature and that’s why those movies were terrifying. Instead, we got to see the rubber fish-man, a lazy hybrid of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Doug Jones version of Abe Sapien. The build up to revealing the monster was decent (I’ll admit, showing us its size by casting its silhouette in front of a falling flare was pretty nice) but there was no payoff when the time came to really see it. If it was kept under the cryptic shroud the impact might have been more forceful, being that was the only character that we really got any true development from. Throughout the film we got to learn its habits, its hunting process, even its intelligence, or lack thereof (it did overlook Jenn hiding under a palm frond right under its nose).

If I was stuck on a deserted island with only this movie to watch, my first action would be wondering how many things on the island can I eat before finding which berry or fish will kill me. Then I’d feast. Between the lazily displayed creature, stale and hammy performances, and shallow story that had abandoned a glaring plot hole (what happened on the raft with Lucas? By the way, two characters enter 45 minutes in, but serve no other purpose than to fill time) Sweetheart is a film that we all flew over and missed, leaving it to meander on its island, and for good reason.

Sweetheart is available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play, and Vudu.