Sweetheart

Shipwrecked after a storm, Jenn washes ashore on a remote island and is forced to defend herself against a hulking aquatic creature that stalks the beach at night.

Sweetheart starts after Jenn has washed ashore on a tropical island.

Very quickly after that, a couple of things happen. First, she finds that her friend Brad has also washed ashore, but he has a large piece of coral stuck in his side, and just before he dies shortly after she finds him, he says, very mysteriously: “Did you see it?” Then, after burying Brad on the beach, Jenn walks easily around the entire length of the small island. Bad news for her, the island is just a circle of tiny beach around a thick brush of palm trees and some underbrush, and nothing else. Then, in the middle of the island, she stumbles across an old campsite. There’s some very dusty and weathered belongings that someone left there, and it's clear that they’ve been there, undisturbed, for a long time. Also, the left behind tarp has three long rents sliced down its side. It turns out, the campsite was last used by a family that had also been shipwrecked and washed up here. She finds some of their graves soon after. This is when she realizes that she is alone in the middle of nowhere.

She spends a first fitful night of sleep on the island as a tropical deluge soaks her.

The next day, as she gathers her meager supplies for her campsite, she discovers that Brad’s grave has been disturbed, his body is gone, and there‘s a trail of blood leading to down to the shore. When she swims out to retrieve a suitcase and some other detritus from the shipwreck, she sees a very dark and ominous hole in the ocean's floor, just off shore.

That night, Jenn rushes from her shelter to hurriedly try to flag down a low-flying airplane with her flare gun, but she’s too late. As the flare slowly falls in the ocean, it lights a huge humanoid sea creature that is standing in the shallow waters off the beach, right in front of her.

For the next four nights, Jenn manages to hide from the sea creature, or to distract it with some fish that she caught with her newly fashioned spear, or maybe a dead body that has washed ashore.

But the creature is definitely hunting her.

On the fifth night, Jenn hides in a makeshift hammock high in the trees, but the monster pulls it down, and chases her after she spills out. Jenn manages to stab the creature with her spear and narrowly escapes.

Throughout all of this, a collection of both dead and alive “Tads” and “Kaitlins” continue to wash ashore, all dressed in soggy sundresses and torn pastel linens and huarache sandals and boat shoes. These various privileged assholes tell the story of who Jenn is, what her life was like before all of this, and how exactly it was that she got into a situation that ended with her being shipwrecked on a deserted island, as well as who the entire fucking problem is in all of this. (Hint… it’s the same people as always.) But the good news is, these assholes all get what’s coming to them.

In the end, Jenn has no other choice but to confront the monster alone. She sets a trap, prepares her weapons, and leaves a note explaining to whoever may find it exactly what happened here, knowing that this night could be her last...

A very tight and effective 82 minute long bit of survival horror from back in 2019, Sweetheart was one of the high points at an otherwise very good year at Fantastic Fest. This movie didn’t get much of any of a theatrical release to speak of, and yes, it was eventually dumped on streaming somewhat unceremoniously, but I really think it would’ve done better if it hadn't had such a bad title. “Sweetheart” doesn’t speak to what the film is about at all, and while the reasons why that was chosen as the title are obvious once you’ve seen the film, it still feels like too much of a reach. I don’t know what I would’ve chosen instead, but I definitely would not have gone with Sweetheart.

But y’know… spilled milk.

Otherwise, there’s a lot to like in this film. I like the relatively simple concept of taking a classic lost-at-sea story, and then throwing in a sea monster. It’s a simple and fun idea, and the two stories go together like peas and carrots. I like that this film was apparently shot in a month in Fiji, and on a micro-budget, featuring one location and only four actors with speaking roles, and mostly just trusts that star Kiersey Clemons’ very natural charisma will carry the story.

I really like that our heroine in this film is actually smart. She makes smart decisions. She’s resourceful. She plans. And despite this, she sometimes still gets screwed. I love that. That’s what makes it fun. Horror movie characters that make smart decisions are basically fucking unicorns, and nothing is more frustrating to me than to watch dummies make dumb decisions in movies like this. I always say… I want to watch smart people, in a bad situation, make some smart and reasonable decisions to try to get out of that situation, and yet still get fucked up. That’s good stuff. That’s good storytelling. This is why I can’t rewatch films like Prometheus or Alien: Covenant. Despite all the obvious good stuff, watching the supposed experts in space exploration make too many inexplicably stupid decisions… to quote Mrs. White… Flames, on the side of my face. So I really loved watching Jenn work the problem over and over. It’s great.

I also love that there is almost no backstory given here at all. Or at least, it’s never directly laid out for us. And I especially like that, if you pay attention to the details, to who Jenn is, to the various Tads and Kaitlins, and all the things they say and do, a picture emerges. It’s clear that Jenn is probably an outsider with this group, both in terms of class and race. Also, she might be taking time off from school, possibly because she can’t afford it. She might be a writer. She has definitely fallen in with some rich kids who aren’t her usual social circle, and beside her boyfriend, most of them don’t like her, possibly because of issues in the past where Jenn might have lied to them (and I’m guessing that she may have lied about her background), and they still hold that against her, and that is probably because they actually don’t like her because she’s poor and black and they’re rich and white, and they use that as a smokescreen to obscure their racism. Either way, Jenn is here because of her rich boyfriend. He’s her key into this world, and even though he’s also an asshole, she‘s been living off his dime for a while now. But that said, right before the storm that wrecked the boat they were on—which was presumably a yacht (but to be fair, I'm judging this specifically off the look of the ice cube bucket that washes up), but either way, belonged to a rich friend of Jenn’s boyfriend—just before she washed up here, Jenn told him that she wasn’t happy, and that she wanted to break-up.

You can glean all of this from the various interactions of the characters, and their little details, and that's really well done. But what’s really cool is that none of that stuff really matters, because the only thing that does is the immediate situation... They’re on a desert island, and there’s a sea monster stalking them.

Loved that.

I also loved that director and co-writer JD Dillard’s whole idea was to put POC in classic genre movie situations, without it solely being about the fact that there are POC in these classic genre movie situation.

As he explained in an LA Times interview:

“My little sisters and I have all grown up being genre-obsessed fans. I don’t think it was until a little later in our lives that we realized so many of our heroes were white. And that’s not by choice necessarily, but when you’re watching old noirs or these big genre stories, it’s so rare that you see yourself. A lot of times we do see white people in those roles. It’s very rare that you see a black or brown or Asian person in those parts. We talk about movies and we talk about giving women and people of color more roles, but the story lines are all kind of the same. We still see women of color end up playing the same parts over and over again. We don’t get to be in niche movies.”

And that’s awesome. It’s clearly what he’s doing here.

But while you’re watching the film, it’s also clear that, especially when you’re focused on American characters, it’s basically impossible to fully escape from the undercurrent of classism, racism, and patriarchal bullshit that runs through the foundation of every facet of American life, not to mention the whole idea that as a person of color, you should be thankful for the scraps that your “betters” toss you, and that when you aren’t, it’s all your fault for not being grateful enough. In many ways, this is a film that is a good illustration of the idea that all art is political.

I definitely loved that.

And I most definitely loved the film’s final message for this modern world… When it comes to dealing with the monsters who want to destroy you, you don’t stop until you’ve burned their whole world down, and then torn their fucking heads from their bodies.

Plus, it seriously has one of the best monster reveals ever.

This is also a film that convinced me that, while I’d never willingly go on a cruise ship–and I can’t understand why anyone would ever choose to be stuck at a county fair meets suburban mall, during a drunken community college spring break meets family reunion, that's being held in a Best Western built in a floating toilet–but if I did ever end up on one, I definitely wouldn’t go without having at least a fanny pack of survival gear ready to grab in the off chance that my boat was about to sink.

So yeah… thumbs up.

Sweetheart is a great little monster flick for Halloween.