(Sorry to drop two spoilery posts in a row, but I’m going to have a hard time talking about this film if I don’t reveal some events in the second half of the film. If it’s one you’re interested in watching, go watch it and then come back here.)
It wasn’t until I sat down to start writing this that I realized I’m covering films about someone stranded on an island with something bad two weeks in a row. And, unfortunately, I’m pretty disappointed with the results two weeks in a row as well. That said, I don’t think it’s anything inherent in the premise. The problems with The Isle were systemic and consistent throughout the film, and in the case of Sweetheart, I think it’s more a matter of an initially promising film that takes a hard turn. It starts off as a brisk, understated story of survival, veering into something else at the halfway point - something much more conventional and much less interesting.
The film opens cold, no title or anything, on a young woman named Jenn washed up on a tropical shore. There’s some wreckage scattered about, and it’s clear there’s been a shipwreck. Once she recovers her wits she discovers someone else, badly injured by a chunk of coral jutting out of his side. It’s apparent she knows him, calling him “Brad,” freaking out at his condition and crying out for help. She tries to remove the coral and staunch the bleeding, but Brad dies of his injuries. Traumatized, Jenn sets to work figuring out how she’s going to survive, looking for fresh water, a source of food, and a way to make a fire. She moves inland in her search, and finds the remains of an old campsite - a backpack hanging from a tree, an old cooler, and a tent long-buried under vegetation. It’s clear this stuff has been here a long time, and there’s no sign of anyone else on the island. This campsite was abandoned suddenly, a long time ago.
Eventually, Jenn comes to grips with the realization that she can’t just leave Brad’s body to rot on the beach. Fighting nausea and horror at her situation, she digs a grave on the beach and buries him. She scavenges matches and some other stuff from the abandoned campsite and eats a small shark that had washed up on the beach…a shark marked by deep furrows and gouges.
At night, there are strange growling and chittering noises coming from the jungle. Something big and heavy walking around. And in the morning, Brad’s grave is empty, the body pulled out and dragged…somewhere.
Soon after, the body of someone else from the boat - a young man named Zack - washes up on shore, badly mangled and torn in half.
The film begins on a fairly strong note, and for its first half, it’s taut, terse, and efficient. It’s just Jenn on the island, figuring out how to survive, which increasingly involves trying to avoid whatever creature is roaming the island at night. There’s minimal dialogue (almost none after the first ten minutes or so), no music to speak of, and scenes transition crisply between one point in time and another, cutting between them sharply in a way that communicates Jenn’s predicament. When the monster comes at night, it’s all inference and suggestion through sound design, and clues left behind during the day, marks of its passing. We only glimpse it once, from very far away. So we know it’s there, but it isn’t overplayed. It’s a film that feels like it’s going to be about a battle of wits and strength between a determined young woman and some strange predator.
Had it continued in this vein for the entire film, it would have been reasonably good, albeit with some plausibility issues (I kept thinking to myself “how is she managing to stay so clean, and where did these other changes of clothes come from?”), but on balance it’s engaging enough at the start that those things didn’t really distract too much.
But then the situation changes and what was a minimalist story of one person’s attempt to stay alive against both a hostile environment and some kind of predator devolves into a soap opera. At about the halfway mark, after Jenn manages to figure out how to stay safe at night (with some close calls), a raft washes up on the beach. Inside are Mia (who was apparently Brad’s girlfriend) and Lucas (who is apparently Jenn’s boyfriend). They’ve both managed to survive for a few days on the open water. At first, they’re happy to see Jenn and relieved to be off the water, but when Jenn becomes insistent that they leave as soon as possible, Lucas and Mia…well, they just turn shitty. They’re whiny and passive and don’t believe Jenn’s account about the creature stalking the island, going from zero to paternalizing in the blink of an eye. They’re deeply unpleasant, and Lucas confronts Jenn in a really nasty fashion, talking about how she makes it so hard for people to believe her and how the only reason she was even on this trip is because he pays her way in everything. He tells her she has no prospects, no future, and nobody else who really cares about her. It’s hard to tell if it was intended to reveal that Jenn was stuck in an abusive relationship, or if it was just a ham-fisted way to cast doubt on the things we’ve seen from Jenn’s perspective.
The performances aren’t great, the dialogue isn’t great either (this was a much better film when people weren’t talking), and because Jenn’s black and both Lucan and Mia are white, we’re basically watching white people tell a black woman that she’s a pathological liar who can’t take care of herself, and that nothing she says happened to her was true. In the moment it feels really gross. Maybe it was intentional, allegorical of the experience of Black America, bur it isn’t at all clear if that was the intention. It feels more like a really unsubtle attempt to cast doubt on what we’ve seen so far, to suggest that maybe this is all in Jenn’s head, and it doesn’t really work.
What was a story about one woman’s survival ends up turning into a half-baked psychological thriller that throws Jenn under the bus without ever really fully committing to the shift - there are hints and feints at something more going on, (mostly in how Zack managed to get separated from Mia and Lucas, which they’re evasive about) but they’re never explored and it’s hard to tell how much of it is just down to really artificial performances. And then, in the final act, it pivots yet again into what is basically a slasher film’s climax, Final Girl badassery and all, only with a guy in a monster suit instead of a masked killer. Indeed, a monster that was only hinted at and suggested for the majority of the film get puts front and center for the conclusion, and like most monster effects, the longer it’s on screen the less believable it becomes. And at the same time the film stops being about Jenn on her own and starts being about how maybe she imagined it all because she’s such a terrible person, the music that had barely been in the first half of the film becomes much more prominent in the second half of the film, ominous, pulsing synthesizers which work fine, but further highlight the ways in which the film has become something much more predictable.
There was something more promising here - the beginning of the film depicts the creature as an almost supernatural force, dragging its food into a mysterious black hole in the ocean floor, with one woman against the elements and this thing trying to kill her, all told as much through inference and detail as anything else. If the filmmakers had stuck to this conceit, I don’t know that it would have been a masterpiece or anything, but it would have been better than I expected going in. But as it is, that wasn’t enough, and trying to stuff a clumsy attempt at psychological horror and an action-packed climax in as well feels either like a lack of focus (I do not understand how this film required three writers) or something like artistic cowardice. It’s a film about a shipwreck that went off-course and sank.
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon
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