Shudder knocks it into the park yet again.
Run Sweetheart Run is one of those films that I anticipate being rather divisive, the kind of movie that will have a less than middling review score on Rotten Tomatoes among critics and audiences will hate it even more. Audiences will hate it for going too blunt with the message, while critics won’t enjoy it for not being blunt enough or for the bluntness “distracting from the bigger picture.” A fair reminder that I don’t read reviews from other sites before writing my own, this could be completely wrong. I’m just guessing.
I’ve mentioned before that Blumhouse gets a good level of my respect purely for the fact that the studio takes small and new directors and mostly just lets them go hog wild with some supervision and some money but a good deal of creative freedom. Jason Blum is generally tagged as a producer on these films and Run Sweetheart Run is no different. Directed by Shana Feste who you may know from her 2014 film Endless Love, Run Sweetheart Run is a horror film starring Ella Balinska as Cherie and Pilou Asbæk aka Euron Greyjoy as Ethan. Cherie and Ethan end up on a date/work meeting that goes awry and Cherie finds herself being hunted by a creature that won’t stop. If you didn’t know from the fact that they cast Euron Greyjoy, he’s the bad guy of the movie.
One aspect I really liked about this film was how much it leaves up to the viewer’s imagination. You figure out pretty early on that Ethan isn’t quite human, especially when the camera is rolling up to the house and he just stops it with his hand. Yeah, Ethan’s powers give him the ability to influence the cameraman, and I’ll note that the plot beats in these reviews are all stuff that was in the trailer. Ethan chooses Cherie for his “hunt,” telling her that if she survives until sunrise he’ll let her live. Uh huh, sure. It’s pretty well assumed that Ethan has no plans letting her live even if she does survive to morning. It’s a very competently shot film.
That being said, the film does feel heavy handed and formulaic with its overall plot beats. The idea of having yet another movie where the main character is marked as a target of a serial killer who enjoys the hunt would be interesting if it hadn’t been done in a thousand other movies over the last few years. Many of those films by Blumhouse itself. Ice cream is good, but you put out two hundred slight variations of vanilla ice cream within a short time frame and eventually it feels lazy and derivative.
Also the story is trite crap, being your typical social justice exploitation film. I’ll spoil the big reveal; Ethan is a creature whose purpose is to hunt down women because powerful women are the biggest threat to powerful men and also women are pure and men are garbage and status quo. Just about every woman in this movie is pure and courageous and smart and witty and friendly and honest and beautiful and did I mention pure? Oh and there’s an ongoing thing about Cherie surviving despite being on her period and nobody giving her a simple tampon. And the men are at best dismissive arrogant assholes who don’t care about women or are threatened by powerful women or are just creepy sex rapists. Especially the white men. God damn white men are evil.
I’m sure Shana Feste is a nice lady, but she does kinda look like the type of person who would call the police if a black dude looked at her car too long in a parking lot. I’m not implying that this film is a response to the fact that her films up until now could count their non-white actors on a clumsy blacksmith’s remaining fingers, but I’m going to let that sentence sit and marinade. This whole genre of films whose message is “patriarchy bad” was cutting edge and hit close to home ten to fifteen years ago. Now it’s old hat and way overdone.
One thing I will say is that Run Sweetheart Run does feel like it was made with the intent of producing a quality film, and it shows in the cinematography. I have no doubt that Shana Feste is not in the same leagues as say Jessica Gao who is a bitter loser that apart from being a talentless hack fraud writer, intentionally created She-Hulk not to be good but to annoy Marvel fans so she could play victim on the internet. I haven’t seen any of Shana Feste’s other films because I’m not a mid-40s housewife/single woman but she seems to be a talented and professional director.
Maybe stop trying to ride the coattails of a post-Jordan Peele Get Out Hollywood and go in a more original direction next time.
Rating: C+
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