Review: Blumhouse’s ‘Sweetheart’ Puts New Spin on Survivor Horror

sweetheart review
Blumehouse

Many of the films we love and revisit year after year are essentially mashups of earlier works of fiction. Hansel and Gretel meets Psycho? Tobe Hooper’s cannibal classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Jaws crossed with 2001: A Space Odyssey? Ridley Scott’s Alien. Rocky mixed with The Wizard of Oz? The Karate Kid. Okay, that last one may be a bit of a stretch, but you get the point. Throughout film history, many screenwriters have developed their ideas by taking the best elements of two or more successful works and combining them into something new. It’s a formula that has consistently proven to be so successful that it is often a shorthand way of pitching movie ideas. Director JD Dillard’s survival horror film Sweetheart, which recently screened at the Telluride Horror Show, nails this very concept and expands upon it.

Related: Check out all of our Telluride Horror Show 2019 coverage here!

Sweetheart takes the age-old fear of being stranded alone on a deserted island, something seen most recently in Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away starring Tom Hanks, and smashes it right into the man-as-ultimate-prey approach seen famously in Predator or the aforementioned Alien. It is a fascinating conceit that Dillard and company pay off well in Sweetheart.  

Produced by Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions and distributed by Universal Pictures, Sweetheart wastes zero time getting to the meat of the story. The film opens with our lead, Jennifer Remming (Kiersey Clemons), a young African-American woman, washing up on an island beach in mid-day. The only other people there with her are a pair of fellow castaways, Brad (Benedict Samuel), who has been gravely injured by a piece of coral and the corpse of her friend Zack. Brad soon passes away and, after covering his body, Jenn sets out for supplies. Conveniently enough, it would seem, she soon finds a tarp, matches, and other supplies. But she also finds a knapsack hanging from a tree branch with Polaroid pictures of a family inside, now nowhere to be found.

Around this same time, Jenn discovers the carcass of Brad has been dug up and savaged, as if by a wild animal. She also finds multiple dead fish washed on shore along with a shark with large claw marks in it. It’s not long before Jenn discovers that she is not in fact alone on the island but that she is being stalked by some unidentified creature at night. On one particular occasion, she is hiding from the monster when a plane flies overhead. She does  manage to run out into the ocean and shoot a flare into the sky before the plane disappears from view. Although she is unsuccessful in getting the attention of the plane, as the flare descends back to the earth, she sees the silhouette of the creature as it fades back into the water.

After several days of surviving the elements during the day and then surviving the real island threat at night, Jenn is joined on the island by two fellow shipmates, one of whom is her boyfriend, Lucas (Emory Cohen). She immediately tries to convince them that they cannot stay on the island and that they all need to leave on their raft as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the two don’t believe Jenn and completely disregard her warnings. They even go so far as to belittle her and bring up off-island issues, her patronizing, entitled white boyfriend being particularly harsh and unsympathetic. With the arrival of these two, Jenn’s fight for survival becomes a war on two fronts.

Dillard does a superb job of crafting a genuinely scary horror film in Sweetheart, hooking the viewer in right from the start. The film is tense and riveting as we slowly begin to learn more about the danger Jenn is facing on the island as well as her own complex backstory. Jenn, who has managed to survive on her own for nearly a week, has her credibility questioned and is even subdued by the two white castaways upon their arrival. Dillard, along with co-screenwriters Alex Hyner and Alex Theurer, has created an original tale of survival with socio-economic and racial undercurrents. Digging even deeper, the film can also be seen as a metaphor for an abusive relationship, as Jenn struggles through the day knowing that the threat will come again at night. The fact that no one believes her when she tells them of the abuse further solidifies this notion.

Sweetheart triumphs where many films of the genre might fail thanks in large part to a strong script, great visuals, and a captivating performance by Clemons. The creature effects, while understated for much of the film, are well done and quite effective in establishing a menacing threat for our heroine Jenn. At a brisk 82 minutes, the film has an almost breakneck pace that never leaves the audience bored or uninterested in the events unfolding on screen. It may initially recall Cast Away and Lord of the Flies and Predator and Bong Joon Ho’s The Host, but Dillard and crew have created an original story that, much like Jennifer Remming, can stand, and survive, quite well on its own.

Sweetheart is currently available on streaming platforms everywhere.


Related Article: Telluride Horror Show Marks Tenth Edition with ‘Tucker and Dale’ Retrospective

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