Sweetheart is a 2019 thriller about a woman who has washed ashore a small tropical island though may not be completely alone.
Waking on the sandy shore of a tropical paradise after, washed up there after an unseen disaster, Jenn (Kiersey Clemons) immediately discovers one of her shipmates Brad (Benedict Samuel) is with her, though doesn’t last long, impaled by a large chunk of coral. She finds another, he too already dead. Desperate and frightened, she soon realizes that she is utterly alone, the island small and totally isolated, an abandoned campsite nearby filled with relics decades old convincing her that there is no hope of rescue. Establishing a foothold, hoping to survive, the night brings a new challenge, a creature of menace on the hunt, forcing her to find a way to live through the dark and make it back to sea in the light of day.
The immediacy of director and co-writer J.D. Dillard‘s intriguing thriller Sweetheart is certainly the best thing going as things get started, the lack of set up in how Jenn came to be tossed on the beach wearing a life vest a secret kept well hidden until the end. What we get instead, is a sense of urgency in trying to keep up with Jenn’s troubling predicament, made all the more visceral when the sun goes down. It’s hard at first not to draw a line to Tom Hanks‘s very different Cast Away, but once that is shrugged off, Sweetheart takes hold in its own way, developing a survival story wrapped in metaphor.
This is a small production, just over 80 minutes, the entirety shot on location on the beach where Jenn rarely speaks, the film relying on its setting and visuals to shape the trauma this young woman is forced to confront. Dillard wisely lets his monster remain unseen for a good part of the film, only the gruesome remains of what it feeds upon littering the beach when Jenn combs the shore each morning, they progressively revealing that whatever is behind the slaughter is big and very hungry. This play between the safety of daylight and the terror of darkness is well developed and surprisingly effective in making it clear without expositional dialogue from Jenn, her exploration of the island the surrounding waters all we need to see in putting the few pieces together.
Things do take a turn in the last act though, one that will become the hinge in how you might swing in favor or not of what Sweetheart is all about. This is not, as it sort of suggests at the start, an authentic story, the creature introduced with an electronic 80s synth score and some clever lighting that gives it a kind of Stranger Things vibe, at least in aesthetics. Jenn is eventually met by others, people she knows, and the battle with the beast, who is thrust front and center, becomes a group effort, even as these new allies don’t exactly offer the expected warmth such a reunion might imply.
Sweetheart is a curious effort, perhaps easy to dismiss at first for its initially inconsistency, the need for a monster feeling maybe unnecessary considering where Jenn is. However, the film is very well made, Dillard both patient and purposeful. Sure, the creature itself may not entirely be all that convincing, but what you get from this is that realism is not what matters, only the symbolism of what it all means. Recommended.