Creature Feature: Sweetheart aka Cast Away Meets The Island of Dr Moreau

Sweetheart was released on Netflix in 2019 and is a Creature Feature directed by JD Miller who also has writing credits. He’s got one other director’s credit for a movie that actually looks really good, a 2016 crime/drama/sci-fi called Sleight. As in, sleight of hand. JD Miller seems to have a crew that he works with and I hope they’re out there making movies still because it’s so nice to watch an original script get brought to life. Netflix has made some questionable decisions lately, but that has been something I’ve enjoyed.

Sweetheart is a Blumhouse joint, and Blumhouse is all over the new horror stuff. It’s not as, I’d say, stylish and polished as some of the artsy A24 “highbrow-horror” films but there’s good stuff in their grab-bag. Like Upgrade - which is a 10/10 must-see sci-fi that has nothing at all to do with this movie breakdown. It’s just absolutely perfect.

Speaking of perfection, Sweetheart has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes - which I was surprised by, seeing as how it’s a 5.8 / 10 on IMDB. I’m taking that as an indicator that critics liked this movie more than the average viewer did, which is completely understandable. It’s PG-13, doesn’t have much dialogue, has a very metaphorical feel, and the creature - well, we’ll get to it.

Sweetheart is a fairly straightforward survival horror on the surface. An aspect of the movie that I personally liked that isn’t a focal point is the fact that the lead actress (Kiersey Clemons) is someone who looks a little more like me. I’ve even recently chopped my hair off and revisiting this I was like, Oh that’s where I’ve seen this “stranded on an island”-vibe haircut that I’ve got going on. The movie is not about this woman being black - despite what some reviewers single out as Wokeness - it’s just that for me, it makes me able to better put myself in the character’s shoes. And when you’re underrepresented in media, you don’t realize the different expectations you have of someone who doesn’t look anything like you. Kiersey Clemons, too, is phenomenal and really grounds this movie in a space of “what would I do in this situation” which is what builds the tension in survival horror. For me, the added layer of “that could be me” draws me in even more. It’s got something to do with internal biases, I know, but that’s how the human brain works and why representation matters across genres of all mediums.

Official Synopsis

Jenn has washed ashore on a small tropical island and it doesn't take her long to realize she's completely alone. She must spend her days not only surviving the elements but must also fend off the malevolent force that comes out each night.

The Metaphors:

Option One: Depression, Addiction & Toxic Friendships

Option Two: The Necessary Evil of Cataclysmic Change

Plot Summary:

Sweetheart begins with Jennifer (Jenn) washing ashore on a tropical island. Her friend Brad has also washed up, but he’s badly injured. He just asks “Did you see it?” and dies shortly after. Jenn gets into survival mode and starts exploring the island. She learns that she’s not the first person to have been stranded on the island - there’s a little group of graves along with some belongings. It seems that it was a mom and her small kids. Jenn goes back to the beach and buries Brad, but the next morning, Brad’s grave has been disturbed and all that’s left of him is a trail of blood leading out to the water.

Jenn manages to retrieve her luggage that’s also washed up but also discovers a deep, dark hole in the ocean floor off the island’s coast. That night, a plane flies overhead. Jenn desperately tries to flag it down, shooting a flare from a flare gun she’d found. But when the flare drops, it illuminates a humanoid sea creature standing (on two legs) on the beach. From here on, every day is a race against time. Jenn spends all day hunting food to eat, sharpening a defensive weapon, scavenging what she can, surviving how she can - and at night, she hides.

When the body of another friend washes up, Jenn sees it as an opportunity. This corpse, named Zack, wasn’t bitten the way Brad had been, but he’s been mutilated and bisected. She uses his body as bait. If she knows where the sea creature is, she doesn’t have to worry about it sneaking up on her. And if it’s fed, then maybe it won’t hunt her. As she’s becoming more adapted to this situation, her attitude changes. She makes a hammock so that she can get a really good look at the creature when it prowls into the trees on the fifth night. The creature finds her hammock and even touches it, slowly lowering it down. Jenn then stabs the creature with her sharpened stick and gets away just barely.

At this point, you can already get the feeling that if Jenn doesn’t get away from this creature, then she’s going to die. It’s not sustainable to never sleep at night even though this tropical paradise has the things that she needs to survive. She has food and water and shelter, but the creature will be the death of her if she stays.

Fortunately, an inflatable life raft washes up on shore the next morning. Unfortunately, there are two people in it: her boyfriend Lucas and his friend Mia. Jenn immediately tells them that they have to go, but the two tell her that the ocean is certain death. She tells them about the creature, but they dismiss her. They don’t believe her. Jenn stresses to them that they have to get out before nightfall, but Lucas snaps at her that they’re not going to leave. This level of hostility is ominous, especially paired with the fact that Lucas’ pocketknife is mysteriously bloody. Jenn hops in the raft and is determined to get the hell off the island, but Lucas & Mia chase her down and throw her out. Mia then knocks Jenn out with one of the paddles. When Jenn comes to, she’s tied up.

She’s still trying to convince them that they’re in danger, especially as it’s getting dark, but they’re not hearing it. Mia starts throwing around the fact that apparently, Jenn has lied about some other things in her past. Basically indicating that Jenn is a pathological liar. Jenn pleads privately with Lucas for him to let her go, but he doesn’t. He then implies that he and Mia had each other’s back - like when Zack started making trouble for them on the life raft.

Before we get any further details, Mia is attacked by the creature. Lucas tries to help, leaving Jenn still tied up, but Mia is dragged away. Jenn manages to get herself loose using Lucas’ dropped pocket knife and goes after Lucas.

The next morning, Lucas is suddenly on-board with the “leaving in the raft” idea. The inside of the raft is bloody, and we can now just about confirm what happened to Zack and how he ended up mutilated and bisected. The creature attacks the raft, clawing through the bottom and snatching Jenn. It drags her down towards the deep hole that it returns to every night. But Jenn still has the pocketknife and stabs the creature with it. The creature lets her go and instead grabs Lucas and pulls him down.

Alone again, Jenn decides that she has to face the creature. There is no running away from it. Knowing that her death is likely, she leaves a note in a journal to warn anyone else marooned on the island of the creature. She writes that people have never believed her, but that she hopes that they’ll believe her about the creature. That, if they need proof, and if she died facing the creature, then her body will be there on the island. But also that not every true story has evidence.

Jenn sets up a proper arena to fight the creature in - a circle made of brush and wood and grass. She plants weapons nearby. That night, she lures the creature into her trap and lights the circle on fire. There’s no way out for each of them, except through each other. Her weapons are sharpened branches and bones from the family that was buried on the island. The creature slashes Jenn’s leg badly. It chases Jenn, who runs to the shore. There, it collapses from its wounds.

Jenn severs the head from its body and limps to the raft, taking the head with her. It’s her trophy, her proof that it all really happened. She sets off into the ocean as the island is engulfed in flames.

First things first: Is Sweetheart a Woke movie?

No.

Is Trading Places a Woke movie? It’s about wealth disparity between classes and about how the parasites that call themselves elites really are the ones feeding off of the rest of society and treating it like a game. But would you call it Woke?

Pictured: Prime Wokeness

The movie just is about what it’s about, and that’s what we’re here to discuss. Sloganizing words doesn’t make them true, it just makes it convenient and is the exact same as calling all purple a shade of blue just because you don’t want to get into the details. Remember it this way:

Roses are Red / Violets are Blue /Just ‘cause shit’s catchy / Don’t make it true.

Let’s get into the metaphors of Sweetheart.

Option One: Depression, Addiction & Toxic Friendships

The most direct metaphor: the creature is the embodiment of addiction and also depression, which often go hand in hand. It preys on Jenn despite her beautiful surroundings. Chases her through the night. Kills her friends. Isolates her from those it doesn’t kill. For Jenn, the threat is real, direct, and will kill her without question.

Her toxic friends, meanwhile, refuse to believe that there even is a problem. They want to believe that things are only as they appear - and to them, her hidden struggles are only manifestations of her own background and therefore are her own fault. Their toxicity is the inversion of what a support system is supposed to be. They are supposed to be a restful, protective, caring group for Jenn to rely on. Instead, they are colluding, selfish, devious people who make compromises with her, completely ignoring the fact that any compromise on what she needs means absolute death for her. These friends are the epitome of a broken support system.

Their toxicity at times rivals that of the creature; a creature’s motivations and intentions are clear. Her friends’, however, are not. They don’t want to help her. Because helping her would be admitting that there’s a problem. They don’t even want to be inconvenienced by the needs of anyone else. They live in a very tight little bubble floating on a vast sea and anything that threatens to burst that bubble has got to go.

Of course, their interactions are rife with classism, and rather than toxic “friends”, they could easily be read as a toxic, broken, social system and how it works for people who actually need help. The thing is, when you’re not on the island - when you, yourself, are not deep in the throes of addiction and/or depression - you may never come face to face with what it’s really like. You may always live on the party boat, thinking that your friends are great, so if anything’s wrong, it must be with you. But washing up in the wreckage of what you thought your life was about and being met with the reality that these scheming cutthroats who are only looking out for themselves - it’s a reality that people live, and Sweetheart gets to the heart of that.

Jenn ultimately has to face her depression/addiction alone. But she has tools that she’s gained from her experience being in the wild; some support lent to her by unseen figures who’d occupied this lonely island before her. She knows that people have been where she is now and that maybe someone will be there after her. She has to face getting herself free.

The innate condescension of the nickname & movie title Sweetheart implies a co-dependency that may or may not exist. But her ex’s use of the nickname certainly attempts to be diminutive and undercut her concerns. His intention is to wrangle her back into their toxic relationship, and calling her Sweetheart paints a clear picture of exactly what he thinks her status relative to himself is.

By freeing herself from the creature, she also is free of everyone else she arrived with. Her friends avoided the issue, and their status didn’t protect them from becoming victims of the very thing that they claimed was all in Jenn’s head. So, Jenn is alone now. The road ahead is not clear of danger, but at least she has touched bottom and will go forward with everything that she’s learned.

Option Two: The Necessary Evil of Cataclysmic Change

This isn’t as tight of a metaphor, but stay with me on this:

The creature isn’t the enemy. The island is the enemy.

The creature is a stand-in for Change (big and scary) and the Ocean is the Unknown. The hole in the sea is the Past.

The island is Complacency. It’s the comforting present, it’s a feeling of nostalgia and time wasted. It’s somewhere you could survive. If you just give up.

The creature is driving her away from the island. It is not letting her get comfortable there. It is forcing her to sleep light, to think quickly, to plan, to work, to get away from her complacency.

It forces a break between her and her friends. It takes them out one by one.

There are others who have come before our main character and perished on this island. And others who have obviously suffered, but who made it off the island. Someone had to dig those graves.

In this metaphor, Jenn reconnects with her vitality and overcomes the complacency that has kept her stagnant. The people and places and things she’d surrounded herself with all had to go in order for her to move on. She’d been fixed in place, not only by her own actions but by the gaslighting presence of those who benefited from her being exactly as she was and nothing more. Landing on the island may have felt like change, but it wasn’t. It was another survivable situation. Real change is what came for her at night, and what she faced down in a circle of fire. Real change is what set her free.

What would have made this a stronger story?

Sweetheart needed a better character arc that implements Show, Don’t Tell.

Jenn needs a stronger beginning and a stronger ending. We start at the inciting incident and see through until the climax, but there’s no introduction and there’s no conclusion.

We don’t see her evolve into this person on the island, the intrepid survivor. We don’t know what she was like before the island. We only have this hearsay version of her, pieced out to us by Lucas and Mia. We hear about things we never see - aka, we are Told things that are never Shown.

Sweetheart should have started at the boat party. With her so-called lies being thrown back in her face by Lucas and Mia as she’s having a mental and emotional break. She tells her boyfriend that she doesn’t want to be with him anymore, that his friends don’t even like her. Maybe the guy who she washes up on shore with, Brad, he could stand up for her but it’s not enough. Jenn is this major source of tension but they’re all stuck together in this boat when the storm comes in. The storm would represent her mood and the swift, sudden shift from peace to uncertainty.

That way when we next see the other survivors, we know what their history is, and we can better feel that they are teamed up against her.

As for the ending, I don’t need to see that she makes it to safety. What I need to see is a definite change, and there’s a brilliant way they could have done this and retained the horror feel because it’s already set up. As it is, Jenn gets clawed by the creature when she faces off with it, eventually burning down the island in the process. (Which, yes, burn down the systems that don’t work for you!) But what if that wound had started to creep up her leg? Grown scaly and tough? What if she were to start turning into the creature? So even as she’s paddling away, we see that she’s physically changing. We don’t know how much she will change, but it’s implied that it’ll be significant.

This would work as a metaphor because it means that Jenn is continuing to embrace change and action. She has become the very force that pushed her into survival. And horror-wise, it would work because, yeah, she’s turning into a literal monster. Maybe that’s why there wasn’t the last grave of whoever buried the little family on the island. Maybe that person made it out - in a different way. Changed, but alive. Nothing like they were before, but strong. Even just as it is, it’s still valid, considering that cataclysmic change isn’t something you want to constantly embody - it’s too chaotic. But accepting the place that you’re pushed into is a healthy way to move on.

However; all that being said, I can see why we are only shown the middle of Jenn’s story, and it seems to have been a very intentional choice:

When you meet someone, it’s always in the middle of their story. Being able to accept someone for who they are today is the luxury of being a stranger. Believing what they say about their past, or about themself, is done in context with the information you’re gathering about them right now. If a person tells you that they used to be an addict, or used to be depressed, you compare that knowledge with how they are today, and don’t judge them by it.

But sometimes a person who is pulling themselves out of addiction, depression, poverty, or anything of the sort - doesn’t want to be defined by who they used to be. They want to be believed when they say these things, but only because it’s true. You aren’t defined by your past; your past simply informs your present.

Except to assholes.

Assholes will continue to define you by your struggle, and toxic assholes will throw it in your face any chance they get. Even those who were close to people during their struggle. Because sometimes your struggle is their entertainment or their justification for their narrow worldview. Hence, in Sweetheart, the metaphorical and literal need for Jenn to get away from those toxic people and begin to redefine herself as who she is now. This is yet another negative thing that has happened to her, and though she embraces the truth of it, she doesn’t want to let it define her.

Her last lines are in a note that she leaves, paraphrased here:

For a lot of my life, I've struggled with being believed. The truth doesn't always come with a receipt. Sometimes all we have is our word. There's no way for me to show you the things that I can tell you… I hope this letter is enough for you to believe my story.

Review:

The elephant in the room. In a Creature Feature, the number one rule is to wait to reveal your monster. The monster works best as the tension is rising, as the protagonist is being hunted, as your mind goes crazy to fill in the details of what it might be, the horrors it could be capable of. The imagination is a writer’s best friend in the Creature Feature.

The reveal of the creature in Sweetheart - not going to lie, kind of took me out of it. Because when I was growing up, there was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ripoff called Street Sharks - and I fucking loved that show. So when the creature turns out to be a Shark Man. I was. You know. It kind of was a tension-killer.

What I do appreciate is that the effects are mainly practical, which you just don’t see now. Except it’s got the Michael Keaton Batman rubber neck thing going on, where it looks like the creature can’t turn its head easily, let alone chase someone down. And there’s a bit of CGI that’s just not great. Unfortunately, with it being a Creature Feature, you kind of want all of these things to be perfect. An example of recent stellar practical effects is the titular creature in Krampus, for comparison.

Otherwise, Sweetheart is a movie I have no real strong feelings about. It’s not terrible. It’s not overly thrilling, but I was engaged the whole way through. The friends are really easy to empathetically hate, and the protagonist feels grounded. There’s not a lot of clutter in the way of the story; it’s an hour and 22 minutes but doesn’t feel that way to me at all because for the scenes where there’s no dialogue, you’re glued to the screen evaluating what you would or wouldn’t do in this survival situation. Once you’ve seen it, it’s a good movie to put on in the background as you’re working on something else.