Run Sweetheart Run | Movie Review
Ella Balinska in Run Sweetheart Run
Devil of a Time: Feste Explores Supernatural Sexual Terrorism in L.A. Thriller
By Nicholas Bell | Published on October 28, 2022
Shaking off the dust it’s been collecting since it premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, director Shana Feste’s Run Sweetheart Run arrives just in time for Halloween, albeit without many tricks or treats to unveil. Though a global pandemic has resulted in rippling cultural shifts since Feste filmed and initially presented her foray into genre territory, its timeless sense of trenchant misogyny, personified by an olfactory driven demon, remains a potent, if hoary banquet of not-so-subtle metaphors. But despite a likable lead performance from Ella Balinska, Feste’s script, co-written by Keith Josef Adkins and Kellee Terrell, gets hemmed up in its own specific circle of hellish repetition while failing to properly contextualize specific or necessary attributes regarding the good and bad forces battling it out in a scenario doomed to nagging superficiality. As its title suggests, the narrative sprints into a cat-and-mouse dynamic as a young woman tries her best to beat the devil during one exhausting jaunt through the pseudo-seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. But a pronounced use of foreboding locations doesn’t save the film’s energies from running dry as it labors over the initial provocations of menstruation, a novel attribute, which eventually drives the narrative into exploitation film territory because it fails to develop the conceptualization beyond the suggestion of the symbiotic relationship of violence and lust inherent in heterosexual men (whether demonic or otherwise).
Cherie (Ella Balinska) is a young, beautiful, single mother in Los Angeles, working as a secretary. Meek but hardworking, she’s accused of double booking her boss (Clark Gregg) on the evening of his wedding anniversary, forcing her to attend a last minute evening meeting with his client, Ethan (Pilou Asbaek). But it seems the event was orchestrated by her boss as way to get her to go on a blind date with the charming and handsome businessman, which is logical to Cherie since friends and co-workers are aware she’s been unlucky in love after her ex-boyfriend Trey (Dayo Okeniyi) left her for her best friend. The work meeting quickly segues into a flirtation, with Ethan extending an invitation to Cherie to spend the night. Accepting his offer, Cherie is immediately brutalized, barely escaping his home only to be arrested for public intoxication. A sex worker in the holding cell with her confirms Ethan is an incredibly powerful and dangerous man, advising Cherie seek out a woman known as the First Lady (Shohreh Aghdashloo), or else she will end up dead like all the other women Ethan targets. When he shows up at the precinct where Cherie is being held, Ethan informs her she can live if she promises to play a game. If she survives the night, he’ll let both her and her infant daughter live. Throwing herself into the bowels of the city, Cherie begins to understand how Ethan is able to preternaturally track her by the smell of her blood, enhanced by her menstruation. Eventually it appears Ethan may be the devil himself, and as she barely stays ahead of his carnage, she eventually locates the First Lady, who has been hoping to find a resilient woman she can use as bait to take down Ethan.
The film has the misfortune of being released after the more eloquent gendered moral dilemmas of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022), which fashions a comparable role for Georgina Campbell and was also conceived by a filmmaker whose creative roots aren't lodged in genre filmmaking. Feste has, heretofore, dabbled in lighter melodrama, such as her saccharine debut The Greatest (2009) or 2018’s Boundaries (which featured a winning performance from the late, great Christopher Plummer), while her 2010 title Country Strong remains her most prominent achievement in the A Star is Born vein of romantically defined musical artists on opposite ends of the fame spectrum. So perhaps it’s not surprising there’s a lull in the energy required for the Tom Tykwer-ish plight of Cherie, a woman plucked from the secretarial pool to be a sexual tithe for some sort of evil masculine entity who has an endless appetite for consuming professionally stalled corporate women. The conceit of what Pilou Asbaek (fittingly sinister in his usual Kiefer Sutherland sort of way) actually is, or metaphorically represents, rather, is initially disturbing, but his dogged pursuit gives the narrative a hopeless energy, requiring the fantastical intervention of the usually fabulous Shoreh Aghdashloo as a nemesis whose powers and schemes are frustratingly vague and conveniently ambiguous. Not even the ultimately futile shootout between Cherie's ex-best friend and the indefatigable Ethan (timed to the finale of their watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974) jumpstarts the narrative’s meandering. Capturing the various disparities of a degrading but vibrant city, between the menacing squalor and the pronounced street art on its looming facades, Run Sweetheart Run is often more visually arresting than its consistently diminishing narrative, leading inevitably to the finish line of daybreak and the femme dom justice which the film wouldn’t have dared to exclude.
★★1/2☆☆☆