In short: Sweetheart (2019)

Jenn (Kiersey Clemons) is washed ashore an, apparently tropical, small island together with a dying friend who’s just alive long enough to at least provide us with the name of our protagonist. Jenn turns out to be a bit of a natural when it comes to wilderness survival, going about the required business of fishing and foraging with considerable intelligence and foresight. So she could most probably survive until an eventual rescue without too much actual danger for her life, if there weren’t a pretty big problem.

Every night, a monster (one of those person-shaped amphibian/fish monsters, it will turn out) comes to the island from its underwater lair to hunt, with clear ambitions of adding Jenn to its diet.

I already thought J.D. Dillard’s first movie, the sort of black superhero origin story Sleight, was a considerable achievement, and an excellent example of how an intelligent script and careful direction can turn a low budget genre affair like it into a truly excellent film. So Sweetheart’s particular excellence doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, seeing how it shares exactly these virtues. Sure, given the Blumhouse involvement, the budget must have grown from miniscule to tiny for the director this time around, but the film still does need exactly these virtues to work.

And work it does wonderfully, the small amount of dialogue giving Clemons enough space to draw Jenn’s character through body language and glances alone, an opportunity she uses very well. There’s no ball she’s speaking to to make things easier on the actress, either, and once dialogue does set in, the film uses this to quietly point out the difference between the audience’s perception of Jenn, and the way others see her and make her see herself. It’s very cleverly done, adding thematic resonance about Jenn’s life as a young black woman without disturbing the fine balance of the monster movie.

For Sweetheart is a great survivalist monster movie indeed, one of those examples of the form where a filmmaker understands the needs coming from his budget, like not being able to afford many shots of convincing full-body monster action, and always seems to draw just the right consequences, using one of the oldest solutions to this problem in the book, only showing the creature in silhouette, in part or in short glances, but making all of these partial impressions count.


Sweetheart is a quietly excellent film, Dillard having excised all of the needless guff that makes a movie like, say, Crawl so bloated and ineffective, to really focus on the core of its sub-genre, his lead actress, and the shadow of a monster drawing near.