Thriller • 14a • 93 Minutes • 2025
Write what you know; seems fitting here. Directed by Emma Higgins, who comes from a background of music video direction, working with the likes of Mother Mother, Jessie Reyez, and Ingrid Andress. Higgins doubles down on the music world for her first feature. Sweetness tells the story of sixteen-year-old fan, Rylee Hill (Kate Hallett), who saves famed rockstar Payton (Herman Tømmeraas) from a drug overdose and holds him hostage in the hopes that she can fix him. While riffing off Rob Reiner’s 1990 classic thriller, Misery, the film splinters slightly to encompass a coming-of-age twist that has all the hallmarks of a great idea, yet falls short from a lack of introspection.
With much of Higgins’ previous music video work bleeding through onto the screen, whether it’s in the story itself or padded scenes with slow-motion glances and non-diegetic music playing in the background, the room left for character development unfortunately slips through the cracks. Much of the territory between obsessive fan and self-obsessed rockstars has been well trodden, but where Higgins finds a new opportunity is the perspective from an obsessed fan that will stop at nothing to make her fantasies come true. In a world dominated by social media and a governmental ban for teenagers, seemingly spreading from country to country, Sweetness feels like it wants to jump into a deeper conversation and analysis of social media, celebrity and obsessive fandom, but instead chooses to sprinkle in coming-of-age sensibilities that water it down to a horror thriller that touches the surface. This isn’t to rewrite the film, mind you; Sweetness at face value is an entertaining film that you can still have fun with throughout if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s not a bad film by any stretch, its ideas just don’t feel fully fleshed out.
Much of the material in the film is just like the title, sweet, and ready for the pickin’s, but with underdeveloped characters and not enough weight to satiate the moral complexity from the psychology of a young girl with violent and disturbing obsessions, the film slips into camp and implausible scenarios the longer the runtime treks along. With Hallett and Tømmeraas doing much of the heavy lifting, their performances, although solid, are weakened by a lack of material to sink their teeth into. Her quiet demeanour and soft-spoken dialogue contrast starkly with Tømmeraas’s upfront rockstar persona. The same can be said with the underutilized Justin Chatwin, playing Ron, Rylee’s cop father. He never really gets the chance to do much other than check up on his daughter and be the source of irony for the audience to question when he is going to catch her. The single thread for any kind of character depth is the shared experience of a lost loved one between the two leads, and while over the past ten years there has been film after film exploring trauma through the eyes of horror and psychological thrillers, it has become a tried and exhausted trope that doesn’t help explain any motivations of the characters.
What would a film about a rockstar be without the music? Thankfully, the music by Blitz//Berlin has you covered. Supplying the songs for the fictional band Floorplan, which Payton is the lead of, Blitz//Berlin help sell the authentic rockstar image Tømmeraas goes for with a soundtrack that will make or break a music-coded film. When you are at the concert venues in the film, that’s where the music and the visuals shine. In what begins to feel like a concert film in the best way possible, Higgins and cinematographer Mat Barkley create a great sense of space within a presumably sold-out concert while heavy fog and lasers wash over Payton and his band. However, as mentioned before, the licensed non-diegetic music played throughout feels more like a placeholder than anything meaningful to push the narrative forward.
While Sweetness tries to subvert the obsessive fan trope and develop more of a twisted coming-of-age story, in doing so the film manages to forget the idea that made it special: the perspective of spoiled and toxic fandom. With proficient performances from the cast, so much of the material could have been developed further to allow for more interesting twists, turns and uncovered truths. Although the film middles-out, all the right instincts are there: twenty-first-century celebrity obsession, Bildungsroman, music tie-ins, making Emma Higgins a filmmaker we will have to keep our eye on.
Where to Watch
Sweetness was rented on AppleTV.
Also worth checking: CBC Gem (often carries Canadian titles not listed elsewhere).
about the author
Merrick Gajdics is founder, publisher and editor of The Canadian Film Reviewer.