OUT NOW: Run Sweetheart Run

A first date gone wrong - when her new suitor Ethan (Pilou Asbæk) turns violent, Cherie (Ella Balinska) runs off into the night.

Without phone or wallet, Cherie is lost in the middle of the city.

And Ethan is on her trail...

I was a big fan of the cast in 2019’s Charlie’s Angels, a movie that was not fully successful at what it wanted to do. Ella Balinska was the unknown of the trio, but I thought she held her own. 

It has taken a while for her to get some follow up vehicles. This movie has been floating around since 2020 - I remember it making the festival circuit just before the pandemic hit.

The premise sounded great - a lo-fi cat-and-mouse chase thriller. I recently watched the 2007 thriller P2, which is a cat-and-mouse thriller about a professional woman trying to escape the underground parking lot under her building, and Run Sweetheart Run felt like a contemporary spin on a similar idea.

While it starts that way, Run Sweetheart Run is not the film I thought it was going to be.

I want to give this movie credit for ambition - writer-director Shana Feste puts a lot of different ideas into the movie. It looks great, and has a solid sense of atmosphere.

It is also weirdly inconsistent, and loses steam as it heads into the home stretch.

Part of it is personal taste - I am not the biggest fan of supernatural horror, unless it is juxtaposed with some sense of grounding.

Our villain is revealed as a supernatural antagonist fairly early, but there is a weird lack of rules to his powers. At points he seems to have power over the film itself - at two specific points he looks directly at the camera and bars it/us from seeing what he is about to do.

At first, it feels like an interesting spin on the idea of the viewer as a voyeur. With Ethan's bona fides as a misogynist so upfront, it seemed like the movie was going to become some kind of comment on the idea of the male gaze.

But aside from those two examples, this breaking of the fourth wall is as far as the device goes. The only other non-diegetic element is the recurring appearance of ‘Run!’ plastered as text across the frame.

At this point the movie feels like a supernatural thriller.

And then it switches genres again, as our heroine finds herself part of a sect of women who train her for a final showdown with Ethan.

This plot development feels a little distended from the rest of the movie - it feels like the movie has turned into a superhero film, with a hidden society, a super-powered mentor (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and a training sequence.

This resolution is so fast that I found it a little hard to see what the point was. Ethan is the literal devil and he is destroyed by a woman empowered by literal angels.

Despite how chaotic it is, there is a scrappy energy to Run Sweetheart Run that I was vibe-ing with. It feels a little too undisciplined to figure out what it wants to be, but it is compelling to watch.