The fishy love interest from Shape of Water has an evil cousin, and he’s here to eat you and all your millennial friends. Sweetheart is part survival, part creature feature, dripping with throwbacks to the the decade when this subgenre dominated sleepover nightmares. Image Credit: Sundance Institute Kiersey Clemons (Jenn), star of last years musical standout Heart Beats Loud (also a Sundance premiere), has the screen mostly to herself over the brisk 90 minute runtime of Sweetheart, and she doesn’t need Wilson’s help to captivate you. Director/Co-Writer, J.D. Dillard, crafts a simple setup in this Blumhouse thriller. After some post-college-prove-yourself boat trip, which is never really explained, two friends wash up on the shore of a deserted tropical island (shot in real life Fiji). The island is beautiful, but so was Fyre Island, and just like Ja Rule’s influencer victims, no one wants to stay. However, in the first two minutes of the movie, one of them becomes a permanent island resident because of well, dying there. Spoiler: it’s not Kiersey Clemons. What’s nice about this rando named Brad’s last few flickering moments is that before he dies, he gives us our first tease of the creature, “Did you see it, too?” Jenn did not see it too, and she goes off to needlessly get him a healing coconut. Even though retrieving this superfood is fruitless, seeing Jenn in the simple act of cracking a coconut serves its purpose. We discover that while she is maybe no survivor, Jenn is...
Published By: CineD - Friday, 8 February, 2019