RUN SWEETHEART RUN (REVIEW)
Updated: Nov 20, 2022
Dir. Shana Feste
Reviewer. Martyn Wakefield
Blumhouse's latest offering from director Shana Feste gives a new voice in horror. Unfortunately it's one that has a message so muddled that it's frankly difficult to hear what's being said.
Opening like a predictably dark romance turned violent hunt as secretary and aspiring lawyer Cherie (flawlessly played here by Ella Balinska) takes a meeting with a client that turns into a date turned assault. The following events see him hint her down in a wild and meandering journey of violence and identity crisis.
Early in the film focusses heavy on the misogynistic workplace and world we live in and pretty much hammers that nail firmly in the cranium before then becoming a lazy monster movie that can't help but be laughed at, not with.
It's strange as so many of the films set pieces SHOULD work but as a sum of its parts, it's a tortured mess of action movie, political standpoint and religious subtext that becomes more satire than anything else. Constant card flashes of RUN! and forth wall usage that gets forgotten all feel like the film is throwing darts to see what sticks rather than having a sole idea and running with it.
It sounds a little harsh to put this when the components are there but simple transitions from a church then travelling to a nightclub via an underground channel and then throwing tampons into a
Like this year's BARBARIAN, which too touches briefly on the #MeToo movement only to disregard it like a used tampon leaving evidence of what could have been a useful weapon, instead striking with the blow of a blow-up hammer rather than wielding Mjolnir as raising these subjects should invoke.
The answer to some of the film's criticism could be down to the fact it was complete in 2019 and suffered a number of reshoots and took until 2022 to get a release. From the studio that has given us HALLOWEEN, THE PURGE and THE INVISIBLE MAN, the fact that RUN SWEETHEART RUN has been accrued straight to Amazon Prime, shows how little faith the studio have in this.
RUN, SWEETHEART, RUN! or a better title would be RUN, AUDIENCE, RUN! or is the title an in-joke as that's what the director told the writers to do?
