Sweetheart

Director: JD Dillard
Screenwriters: JD Dillard, Alex Hyner, Alex Theurer

Institute History

  • 2019 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Washing ashore onto a desolate island, Jen (Kiersey Clemons) has already survived a harrowing ordeal. Stranded and alone, she searches for shelter. Finding only the scattered remains of a long-abandoned campground and weary from her terrible journey, she collapses in hope of a peaceful rest. But night is when it’s most dangerous here. That’s when the creature comes. And when it slithers out of the water, it must feed.

Returning to the Sundance Film Festival after the genre-bending Sleight wowed audiences in 2016, director JD Dillard brings a refreshingly scrappy yet sophisticated sense of urgency and ingenuity to the classic creature feature. Kiersey Clemons owns every frame of the story, shining each step of the way as she’s forced to outrun, outwit, and outfight an otherworldly thing that hunts her each night. Methodically stripping this Blumhouse Productions chiller down to the raw essentials, Dillard shrewdly keeps the tension on a calculated simmer until the moment it boils.

— L.Z.

Screening Details

Credits

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