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.

Sleight (2016)

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Without parents, any visible family, or a decent system of social care – particularly for poor and black people like them - available, young Bo (Jacob Latimore) has to take care of his sister Tina (Storm Reid) all by himself. So he works as a street magician by day, and sells drugs for the seemingly personable – as far as it goes in this business - drug lord Angelo (Dulé Hill) by night. Bo has secrets, though. For one, he does what amounts to actual magic with the help of a home made electromagnet device he has implanted in his arm, like a low key junior gadgeteer superhero. Secondly, and much worse, he is skimming off Angelo’s drugs in an attempt to scratch together to take Tina and leave Los Angeles for somewhere where they can live the life of normal people. That’s particularly unfortunate since Angelo would really rather pull Bo deeper into the Life, doing his best to involve him in more than just dealing, and so has a rather more careful eye on him.

So, at about the same time as Bo’s life changes for the better when he meets and falls in – reciprocated – love with Holly (Seychelle Gabriel), a young woman who we will later learn to have a high tolerance for pretty shitty secrets in her boyfriend, thanks to the difficulties in her own life, things with Angelo start to unravel. Soon, Tina’s and Holly’s lives are threatened, and Bo’s only way out might be to turn his invention for letting coins float into a weapon.

So yes, and obviously, J.D. Dillard’s Sleight can very easily be read as a low key superhero origin story, just one that concentrates on the kinds of people contemporary big budget superhero films still tend to ignore or short-change. This is a film about black, poor people who feel forced to do some pretty shitty things to survive; indeed, some viewers might find Bo “unsympathetic”. He sure as hell does a lot of morally inexcusable things, but like any good film about someone seeking some form of (in this case non-mystical) transcendence, Sleight needs to show what their protagonist has to transcend. And that he does indeed manage to transcend a situation resonant with the way many people actually have to live in one way or the other rather seems to be the film’s core concern to me, a very classical use of the fantastic as a means as well as a symbol for the wish to change and to escape.

As for me, I can’t say I actually ever found Bo unlikeable or unrelatable, but then, there but for the grace of mere chance go I, or really, everyone, so who am I to judge? It does of course help that Latimore’s performance is as warm as it is conflicted, portraying Bo as a guy who thinks he does the best he can in his situation, and who is in the end willing to risk himself for others, and achieving actual change for others and himself in the end.


Formally, Sleight as an entry into the growing number of US films of the fantastic by black directors is very much a contemporary indie (the sort with a budget, but not riches) movie. It is carefully staged, deliberately paced, with a sometimes carefully hidden sense of poetry next to a much more obvious idea of realism, demonstrating a willingness to work with genre elements in ways that’ll annoy some viewers because it makes so little of a thing of them, but which delight me because their use feels so personal and individual and through this, actually meaningful.