Run Sweetheart Run Review: The Manic Look, With A Little Humor, Make Ethan’s Figure Seductive and Repulsive at The Same Time

Stars: Ella Balinska, Pilou Asbæk, Clark Gregg

Director: Shana Feste

Streaming Platform: Amazon Prime Video

Filmyhuype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Two years after its premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Run Sweetheart Run finally lands on Prime Video. Director Shana Feste’s first foray into the horror genre but certainly not the last – after finishing the shooting of the film, she said that she will only shoot horror films – Run Sweetheart Run presents itself as a very personal stylistic reworking of a trauma that has accompanied for a time the director: she was the victim of an arranged date that turned out to be a real nightmare and made her the victim of sexual violence. In our Run Sweetheart Run review, we will see how Shana Feste has skillfully managed to carve out the appropriate narrative dimension to intercept a very topical discourse – violence against women – without giving up entertainment and a directorial signature that, we are sure, has just begun its run.

We didn’t have a pandemic, the world was different, and the genre was also at another time. But after almost three years, the feature arrives on Prime Video and shows that some things, narratively speaking, have changed little. The director Shana Feste (from dramas like Limits and Endless Love) manages with Run Sweetheart Run to debate issues, and concepts and provoke a reflection on several super current themes, here supported by a brutal and bloody night that the young Cherie (Ella Balinska) lives after a blind date with Ethan (Pilou Asbæk), a client of the company she works for, turns into a traumatic event and she has to run to survive.

Run Sweetheart Run Review: The Story

Initially fearful when her boss insists on meeting one of her most important clients, young single mom Cherie (Ella Balinska) feels relieved and genuinely involved when she meets the charismatic Ethan (Pilou Asbæk). The influential businessman exceeds all expectations and makes Cherie lose her mind but, at the end of the evening when the two are alone together, he reveals her true violent nature. Cherie, terrified, runs away to save her: this will begin an implacable game for her survival, in which Ehtan, a bloodthirsty beast intent on psychologically destroying her, will not stop grabbing her young girl. In this dark thriller that does not give up on comic tints, Cherie finds herself in the crosshairs of a stranger and a more evil conspiracy than she could ever have imagined.

And Run Sweetheart Run is a beautifully crafted film that uses a lot of symbology to tell this story in a good job by the production team, no doubt. But it also seems to stop there. Whether in the small hints that the script by Shana Feste, Keith Josef Adkins and Kellee Terrell give to a certain event that appears in the plot of the long halfway through and that changes our view of the story, or even the small interactions of the long with the spectator, whether on signs saying “No é the exit” or signs for RUN! that appear on screen, or even when Ethan takes command of the camera in the heaviest scenes in a very interesting fourth wall break.

Thus, Run Sweetheart Run will unfold this plot that becomes a much bigger one than we will just see Cherie try to escape from a now distraught Ethan who proposes a deal with the young woman after she flees his aggressions for the first time: “I will hunt you down and you have until daybreak to escape and try to survive”.

Run Sweetheart Run Review and Analysis

If you name Cherie, the men around you will feel further empowered to give you endearments and dubious nicknames. Automatically, you become a sweetheart to everyone. The red of your blood, your clothes and you’re being a woman will be smelled, trying to bend your existence to a system that perceives you as a “treasure” and nothing more. Starting from the situation of disadvantage sewn around her person and typical of the origin stories of the heroes, Cherie will have to try to get rid of the connotations and perceptions that others project on her, in a chase between cat and mouse that seems to be taken directly from the pages of a graphic novel. Los Angeles is a sin city, where to get rid of barbarism you must constantly try to keep yourself clean. There is no beginning to the game, there is no milestone this hunt will come to potentially, everything about LA scares, from the cab driver to other women who don’t believe our testimony: Cherie could be in this mechanism distorted for some time already, but only realizing it when a charismatic businessman turns off the lights of the city.

The key to the dialogic partnership between the director and actress makes the whole narrative proceed. Where even Shana Feste is not allowed to intervene between the fear of the victim and the brutality of the executioner, the director chooses to direct her protagonist through the camera. The torturer tells Shana Feste not to approach, relegating the impact of the violence he perpetrates to the home run, with only the sound system intended to echo it. At this point, the only way the director can create a correspondence with Cherie’s intellect is through the film medium she masters: she tries to make her understand when to escape, to offer her some holds and lead her towards an escape route that, perhaps, he would have liked someone to point them out in real life.

Navigating the streets of a far-from-hospitable Los Angeles and in the psychology of a villain who is dehumanizing himself, Shana Feste packs a horror that is sincerely sorry to be able to see two years late. With a well-balanced synergy between writing and the various technical sectors – there is no lack of camp references that could lead to trash, but the director always manages to bring the focus back to the journey of her heroine – Run Sweetheart Run succeeds, with all the limitations of the case, being a project in its way, where an ambitious work like Alex Garland’s Men has fallen: in the staging of the point of view, in the construction of an all-round heroine who finds her strength in the bond with other figures feminine. From daughter to other victims, passing through the same director, Cherie is a final girl destined from the start. She screams and fights for the silence of those who had to fight like her and didn’t make it.

Run Sweetheart Run Review: The Last Words

Run Sweetheart Run is a film from the point of view, in which the heroine and the director converse continuously: it is a conversation that is often hindered but carried on ostracizing a silence that has done too much harm and against which one can only run. legitimizing every symbolism linked to being a woman that we can analyze during the film. Cherie fights, above all, in the name of the red colour: that of the blood that makes her alive, of the physiological changes that make her a woman, of the wounds that will make her a warrior. A warrior who is not afraid to run.