RUN SWEETHEART RUN (2020)

Studio:     Blumhouse/Amazon Studios
Director:    Shana Feste
Writer:     Shana Feste, Keith Josef Adkins, Kellee Terrell
Producer:  Jason Blum, Effie T. Brown, Shana Feste, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones
Stars:     Ella Balinska, Pilou Asbaek, Dayo Okeniyi, Betsy Brandt, Ava Grey, Lamar Johnson, Jess Gabor, Clark Gregg, Shohreh Aghdashloo

Review Score:

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Summary:

After their arranged dinner date takes a terrifying turn, a young woman goes on the run through Los Angeles to escape a mysterious man.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Due to a supposed double booking he blames on her, attorney James R. Fuller forces his marginalized receptionist Cherie to take a dinner meeting with a client, Ethan Sacks. Cherie arranges for a friend to babysit her toddler daughter, then meets with Ethan. The dinner turns into a date as Cherie and Ethan take a mutual interest in one another. Their evening ends with Ethan inviting Cherie inside his lavish home for a drink and Cherie making arrangements to potentially spend the night.

Behind a closed door, Ethan unexpectedly attacks Cherie. Cherie flees from the house in terror, and ultimately convinces two bystanders outside of a movie theater to call the police.

The responding officers dismiss Cherie’s claims of being assaulted and instead arrest her for public intoxication. While in jail, Cherie recounts what happened to a hooker occupying the same cell. From details Cherie describes, including his intense hatred of dogs, the hooker realizes she knows the man who attacked Cherie. Frightened, the hooker warns Cherie that she is now a marked woman who can only be helped by the “First Lady” or else she will end up dead. The hooker adds that Ethan is unrelenting and has the power to control other men.

Under Ethan’s influence, an officer allows Ethan inside Cherie’s cell to taunt her. Ethan tells Cherie that no one will believe her story because no one cares. He then proposes giving her a head start for a hunt where Ethan will allow Cherie to live if she can survive until sunrise.

After being released from the station, Cherie takes a taxi to James Fuller’s downtown apartment thinking her boss can help her since the police won’t. Although James initially appears concerned and surprised about Ethan’s actions, Cherie discovers from James’s laptop that James purposely arranged for her to be another woman sacrificed in a long line of tithes to Ethan. James’s wife Judy privately warns Cherie that Ethan can track her through the strong scent of her menstrual blood.

Having confirmed her boss has been secretly conspiring with Ethan, Cherie flees the apartment. While on a bus, Cherie calls her ex-boyfriend Trey to pick her up. She also notices a phone number for the First Lady scrawled on a Missing Persons poster.

To prevent her period from attracting Ethan, Cherie stops at a convenience store to purchase tampons. Ethan attacks Cherie outside the store’s exterior bathroom. The store clerk attempts to intervene, but Ethan compels him to go away. Cherie uses the opportunity to escape to Trey’s vehicle.

Following a tense interaction over their broken relationship and Cherie’s initial reluctance to explain what happened, Trey takes Cherie back to the house he shares with several roommates, including Cherie’s former best friend Dawn, who is now Trey’s girlfriend. Cherie receives an ominous fortune when she asks Trey’s friend Norlon to read her tarot cards.

Ethan comes to the house. Now wanting to stick up for Cherie, Dawn and four other friends try to kill Ethan with guns and blunt objects. Ethan ends up supernaturally slaughtering all of them before finally biting off Trey’s head.

Cherie goes back on the run. A car strikes Ethan while he is in pursuit, but he recovers without any injuries.

Cherie escapes to a church where she has a strange encounter with a priest, Father Raul. Despite trying to throw him off by tossing her used tampon onto a passing truck outside, Ethan turns out to be the priest in disguise. Ethan then transforms into a massive monster. The real Father Raul helps Cherie escape through a secret passage leading to an underground club.

Cherie tries painfully cleaning her wounds with bleach to mask her blood’s scent. Seeing the phone number on another Missing Persons poster, Cherie arranges a meeting with the First Lady. Three young women then help Cherie get out of the nightclub after several aggressive men try to hassle her.

Ethan kills the other three women by causing their car to crash. Ethan begins taunting Cherie again, but he is frightened away by a stray dog that becomes Cherie’s companion.

Cherie makes it to the First Lady’s sanctuary. The First Lady introduces herself as Dina, an angel who was sent to stop Ethan. Dina explains that Ethan is a corrupted angel, or demon, who was sent to protect and guide humanity, but instead misused his abilities to ensure men stayed in power.

Because Ethan is obsessed with Cherie’s blood, Dina convinces Cherie to be bait in a trap by warning that Ethan will go after Cherie’s daughter after killing her. Cherie ultimately lures Ethan to the Santa Monica Pier. Ethan captures Cherie there, but she distracts him long enough and begins fighting back in time for sunlight rays to weaken him. Dina finally sets Ethan on fire. Cherie returns home to her daughter.

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Review:

The beleaguered release history of “Run Sweetheart Run” began with its January 2020 debut at the Sundance Film Festival. Having been born under their microbudget BH Tilt banner, Blumhouse announced one month later that the movie would come to theaters that May. “Run Sweetheart Run” was also scheduled to have a sophomore screening in March at SXSW, but COVID-19 suddenly pushed the project into limbo, much like every other film Hollywood suddenly had no idea what to do with.

By April of 2020, Blumhouse backtracked the May theatrical date. Instead, Amazon announced it had acquired “Run Sweetheart Run” for its Prime Video service, although no new date came with the news. It would be another two years before anyone provided an update, when Amazon revealed in August of 2022 that “Run Sweetheart Run” would finally stream into homes in October.

Now, it’s not unusual for a festival circuit film to encounter difficulty with distribution; some never find distribution at all. It’s also not unusual for Blumhouse to sit on a finished product for months or even years; they’ve done it before with movies like “Mercy” (review here), “Hurt” (review here), and “Thriller” (review here).

What seems strange, however, is that despite the entire world sheltering at home for over a year and a half, and with everyone anxious for fresh entertainment to stave off stir craziness during that period, no one at Amazon or Blumhouse found a better place to put “Run Sweetheart Run” than in the insanely overcrowded Halloween release window of October 2022. Since May of 2020, it was always planned to go direct-to-streaming anyway. So why wait until viewers were least likely to notice “Run Sweetheart Run,” let alone make time to actually watch it?

“Run Sweetheart Run” takes everything to impossibly outrageous extremes, starting with Cherie and her incredibly bad day. An aspiring attorney and struggling single mother working as a law firm receptionist, Cherie begins her morning by filing a complaint about a coworker. A montage of other ignored women answering phones confirms this is a workplace dominated by men, so Cherie’s concerns only earn a customary brush-off from HR.

Later, while an opportunistic pervert molests her on the bus, Cherie takes a dressing down over the phone from her boss, one of several men who reductively refer to her as “Sweetheart.” Apparently, Cherie double booked her boss for dinner, and he needs her to entertain a client in his place. Occupying the short end of their power dynamic, Cherie has no choice but to apologetically accept the proposal. Probably the least of her troubles, Cherie also happens to be on her period, and her toddler just tossed her last tampon into the toilet.

Taken individually, each of the instances recounted above illustrates a problematic situation that women encounter regularly wherever institutionalized misogyny remains the norm. Taken together, Cherie gets tied to so many tropes in such a short period of time that “Run Sweetheart Run’s” fiction floats away into absurdist overkill territory almost immediately.

Things start looking up when Cherie meets the client, Ethan, and their dinner turns into a date. In keeping with the film’s penchant for installing cartoonish caricatures in place of grounded characterizations, Ethan is a charismatic alpha male who worries if admitting he is “a cat person” effeminizes him as “a red-blooded adult man.” It doesn’t help that he’s played by Pilou Asbaek, an actor like Iwan Rheon whose role on “Game of Thrones” ensures audiences will always see him as a despicable villain.

Initially charmed enough that she agrees to come in for a drink and possibly spend the night after their evening of roller-skating and a cute kiss, Cherie soon learns what those “Game of Thrones” viewers saw coming. Behind a closed door, Ethan assaults Cherie in an unseen attack, beginning a night of terror that sees the frightened woman fleeing throughout Los Angeles while bystanders turn blind eyes or call her claims “crazy.”

The police are predictably no help. Instead of investigating Ethan, they arrest Cherie. These scenes exist to justifiably criticize patterns of poor law enforcement responses to assault allegations, but also to poorly provide exposition. Put in a cell whose only other occupant is a hooker in a fur coat and go-go boots, stereotypical streetwalking attire only ever worn in movies, Cherie recounts what happened. In a convenient coincidence, the hooker knows exactly who Cherie is talking about based only on his fear of dogs and a habit of pouring gin and tonics for guests. Ethan is indeed a literal monster, and the hooker explains that Cherie’s only hope of surviving his hunt is to find the mythical “First Lady” and outlast Ethan until sunrise.

On the surface, the nearly three-year span between when a festival audience first saw “Run Sweetheart Run” and when the public at large could is a long stretch, yet not necessarily long enough that one would assume a change in social climate could affect how the film is viewed. Undoubtedly inspired as a rightly angry response to what the MeToo movement exposed, “Run Sweetheart Run” probably felt timelier in early 2020. The issues still exist, except now that the mainstream’s collective mind has moved on to post-pandemic, economic, political, and worldwide warfare concerns, “Run Sweetheart Run’s” window isn’t as wide.

“Run Sweetheart Run” paints its fabulist fable with such a thick brush that its preaching can only be heard by the choir. The film becomes a parody of itself, trying so hard to ensure every possible point it wants to make becomes a story beat that it’s impossible to take its message as seriously as it should be. The movie doesn’t even appear to take its own shtick seriously, diminishing immersive believability with goofy gimmicks like Asbaek breaking the fourth wall to wink at the audience or superimposing “Run!” over freeze frames like the film is an action-comedy where an earthbound angel actually drives a convertible Corvette with vanity license plates.

At best, “Run Sweetheart Run’s” haphazard handle on tone amounts to a questionable approach to telling a story, even a supernatural one, about surviving sexual assault. At worst, it’s downright tasteless. Viewers are free to decide for themselves, although for whatever reason, where the film found its final place on the release calendar might say something about how much attention people in power thought this movie should be paid.

Review Score: 45

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