Film Review: Sweetheart

Sweetheart is a film that gets right down to business. It opens with Jenn washed up on the shores of a beautiful tropical island. Beside her is a friend, who dies of his injuries only minutes after she comes to. Now she’s all alone, and forced to survive the elements. However, during her walk around the island, she discovers supplies from what seems like a previous survivor who curiously doesn’t seem to be around anymore. Things are soon made a tad more clear when it turns out a creature resides in the waters surrounding the island, and it comes out at night to find food, and drag it back into the sea.

Like I said, this film gets going fast, and wastes little time for anything extraneous. It clocks in at a brief 82 minutes, and each second is used with purpose and a great sense of story economy. There’s definitely a lot of limitations that the filmmakers are working with, but they work with it effectively, and the film looks and sounds great, the effects are strong, and Clemons is a terrific lead that is easy to get behind and root for. She easily gets you swept up in the crisis her character finds herself in, and the complications she faces make it all the more intense.

The film plays out like a mix between Cast Away, The Creature From The Black Lagoon, and Predator. Funnily enough, we you do get a glance at the design, it does look a little bit like what the original Predator costume was when it was being played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. The creature stuff is fun and engaging, and the sequences have a great deal of suspense to them. The effects are well done, looking like it is a blend of both practical, costume work and visual effects.

The film was directed by J.D. Dillard, who also co-wrote it with Alex Hyner, and Alex Theurer. I’ve had my eye on him for a while since I was a huge fan of his debut, Sleight, a grounded superhero story, which I felt was the most underappreciated film of 2016. Sweetheart isn’t quite on the same level as Sleight, mostly because the minimalist approach does take away from the character work, which is what I liked most about Sleight.

It’s not that the character work in Sweetheart is bad, but certain details are revealed about Jenn later on that don’t have the necessary impact because it’s all context is given to us after the fact. Context that we can’t really apply to anything we’ve seen, so it all just has to be taken at face value. I think more time could’ve been spent setting up these details with a prologue that takes place before the events of the film because otherwise the information we get doesn’t paint as full a picture as much as it should, especially in regard to Jenn’s relationships with her friends, which plays a bigger role than you’d expect.

Despite this, Sweetheart still totally works as a visceral survival tale. It’s a lean, mean, propulsive, well made monster movie that contains a really good and engaging lead performance. It falls short on being great, but there is a good time to be had with the simple thrills and chills that Sweetheart offers. It’s a bummer that it was very unceremoniously thrown into digital platforms because this would’ve been a neat watch on the big screen. J.D. Dillard has shown a strong grasp at his craft with two small features, and I really hope he gets the chance to tackle something bigger in the future. Also, check out Sleight because not a lot of people saw it, and it’s really good.