Run Sweetheart Run review.
Run Sweetheart Run brings up the age-old question of how to rate a movie that takes big swings but doesn’t connect with enough of them. Do you applaud the attempt or dock it for the miss. The obvious answer is to do both…but that’s the review, not the rating. Guess we’re about to find out.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Run Sweetheart Run
Directed by Shana Feste
Written by Shana Feste, Keith Joseph Adkins and Kellee Terrell
Starring Ella Balinska, Pilou Asbaek, Clark Gregg and Betsy Brandt
Run Sweetheart Run Review
Run Sweetheart Run is a lot of things. Subtle is not one of them. Men are monsters, women can’t walk down a street without fearing for their lives, institutions will fail you and femininity is a superpower. That’s all written on its surface. Stories often exaggerate their message to make their point. Run Sweetheart Run makes the message the entire movie. Sometimes very effectively. Fortunately, there is a bit more going on under the surface.
Cherie (Ella Balinska) is sent by her boss on a dinner date with a client named Ethan (Pilou Asbaek). They hit it off and she goes to his home for a drink. A short time later she runs out of the house bleeding and terrified. When she goes for help, she is arrested for public intoxication. Ethan finds her in jail and tells her that he is going to hunt her and if she can survive the night, he will let her live.
Run Sweetheart Run’s chase is on…and the chase is thrilling. Cherie is a single mother who wants nothing more than to return to her child. She is thwarted at every turn by either Ethan finding her or by society itself. The message is heavy handed, for sure…but the methods of implementing those messages are almost always interesting.
Early in the movie we get the first example of the outside the box thinking co-writer/director Shana Feste is doing. Ethan stops before he and Cherie enter his home, turns to the camera, and tells us we can’t come in. We hear the violence before Cherie bursts through the door…but we don’t see it. This later explored further when Ethan catches up to Cherie outside of a store. He directs our attention away before he abuses her. The message is clear that people who turn their attention away from violence against women are complicit in it. Ethan’s entire game hammers this home. The only way to stop him is to drag him into the light of day.
Cherie reacts to her situation the way anyone would. She turns to the police, she seeks answers from her boss, she runs to her friends, turns to strangers. Nothing works. Some don’t believe her, others are corrupted by Ethan’s power…still others are simply ill equipped to handle it. Whatever the case, Cherie finds herself time and again alone and on the run. Speaking of which…whenever these situations turn from hopeful or helpful to dangerous or corrupted the movie throws a giant “RUN” on the screen. It helps set the off-kilter nature of the storytelling. It’s also fun.
The chase is the best part of Run Sweetheart Run. Somehow, Ethan can follow Cherie’s scent. Specifically, the smell of her blood. That’s an especially big problem for Cherie because she is menstruating. Her run is as often for tampons as it is to escape Ethan. Again, there is no subtlety going on here. At one point a character flat out tells Cherie that her blood isn’t her weakness it is her power.
Balinska turns in a fantastic performance. Physically demanding, emotionally deep and without a moment’s rest. She carries the movie when it’s flying and sells it when it takes a questionable turn. This year we’ve seen the leads of Sissy, Smile, Pearl and Terrifier 2 raise the bar. We can now add Balinska to the list.
One of the other interesting aspects of the story is the way women step up to help a woman in danger. A frightened wife imparts her wisdom at the risk of being overheard. An enemy sets aside their anger in recognition of Cherie’s situation. Strangers jump in to help her out of a bad spot. And then there’s the final act that we can’t get into without spoilers.
That final act is…something. On the one hand it gives you the expected. Cherie’s growing power to stand up, fight back and take back control of the narrative. On the other hand, it makes…odd…choices. Knowing that Ethan can track her scent probably leads you down a path of thought that Run Sweetheart Run isn’t just the story of a man chasing a woman. The third act of this movie takes some of the wildest swings you’re going to see in a relatively grounded movie. And it only hits on a couple of them.
How you view Run Sweetheart Run is going to come down to how you accept that third act. But it shouldn’t. The set up and execution of so many aspects of the movie are more interesting and entertaining than you expect going in. The bold tries it makes in the final act are something we need more of in genre movies. Even if they don’t quite work.
Scare Value
If it isn’t clear from the Run Sweetheart Run review, I’m not sure it always knows what it’s going for moment to moment. Some choices are presented with such clarity and confidence, others are met with a furrowed brow and a head scratch. Not every choice works…some outright flop. Don’t dismiss it for the heavy-handed nature that it hammers its message…there’s a lot to enjoy here because and in spite of it. Boldness is a virtue that not enough genre films possess. At Scare Value…we admire the swings.
3/5
