Run Sweetheart Run review—goofy first date from hell B-movie

Ella Balinska in Run Sweetheart Run. Photograph: Amazon Prime Video

A lady is being pursued through the streets of Los Angeles in a goofy Amazon thriller that gives some light entertainment before going beyond

In the confusing late-night film Run Sweetheart Run, written and directed by Shana Feste, Cherie (Ella Balinska), a young single mother seeking to succeed at a male-dominated, female-assisted Los Angeles legal office, endures a number of sexist slights. The guys around her are frank and unapologetic of their improper behavior, which she is used to but still resents. This includes unwanted touching on the bus and inappropriate behavior at work.

Cherie is asked to see a customer in lieu of her boss, who is double booked due to a scheduling error, so she scrambles to find a last-minute babysitter and an outfit. After yet another day of shady guys, Cherie is pleasantly delighted to meet Ethan (Borgen and Game of Thrones alum Pilou Asbaek), who is charming and polite. However, when their date moves from a fancy restaurant back to his opulent house, things quickly turn from very lovely to very, very terrible.

Feste, a director more commonly known for earnest non-genre films like the Gwyneth Paltrow music drama Country Strong and the teen romance Endless Love, has referred to Run Sweetheart Run as “Get Out for women,” which is a refreshingly honest admission that her movie is a significant contributor to the sometimes-wearying rise in so-called social horrors. Since Jordan Peele’s gamechanger, it’s become increasingly difficult for filmmakers to even get the basics of this subgenre right, and Feste’s admirably ambitious attempt only manages to achieve about a quarter of that. Her film performs best in the opening act, when the focus is more on social issues than on horror.

Cherie, like many women, is ruthlessly made aware that male danger lurks around every corner even before the movie descends into violent, full-tilt mayhem, so the world is already a terrifying place for her. It’s an overt escalation, but it works because, well, sexism is so often overt, and Balinska, a Charlie’s Angels survivor, is a nice and sympathetic performer who doesn’t have to work hard to win us over and keep us there. Feste decides to remove the fourth wall when the microaggressions escalate to macroaggressions, which is a commendable course correction to the many, many films that enthusiastically revel in women in agony. Feste’s persistent usage of on-screen text instructing her lead to “RUN!” whenever things get scary also contributes to this. Given how much of the movie is created without the same feeling of dazzle, these huge swing B-movie flourishes seem all the more out of place.

The screenplay, which was co-written by writer Keith Josef Adkins and newcomer Kellee Terrell, starts to run out of steam as the action progresses and descends into extreme and very contentious absurdity in ways that sometimes are endearingly silly but are mostly not. The challenge of balancing a genre movie “that’s really about ______” is that when you’re attempting to make a point about a real, concrete problem using an absurdist device, the difference between your ability to master the two, between everyday reality and fantastical fiction, can ultimately make or break your point. Peele showed in Get Out that he was equally skilled at both by pulling off the reveal’s far-out nuttiness after such meticulous buildup. The earlier this year thriller Fresh by Mimi Cave, which likewise converted the horrors of dating and common sexism into true terror by easily sliding from coercive to cannibalistic behavior, again reminded me of how fierce and intense it was. However, in this case, the transition to outrageous hokiness is far more difficult to accept or even comprehend, pushing the movie further away from thriller-horror and into comic book fantasy.

It’s difficult to know what to believe or how we got here by the time a vampire Shohreh Aghdashloo appears as an ancient mystical entity who uses menstrual blood to preserve the souls of selected women while claiming that the Adam and Eve account is a fabrication. Given the low-effort character of so many genre movies, it’s hard to criticize a movie for being too ambitious, but Run Sweetheart Run’s sheer, two-joints-in bizarreness deserved a more steady hand to lead us through. As it is, the sprint to the goal seems more like a crawl.

Run Sweetheart Run is available on Amazon Prime on 28 October

Thanks to Benjamin Lee at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.