- Director: Emma Higgins
- Writer: Emma Higgins
- Stars: Kate Hallett, Herman Tømmeraas, Justin Chatwin, Amanda Brugel, Steven Ogg, Aya Furukawa
REVIEW
At some stage in your life, you’re going to have a celebrity crush. A musician or an actor, even some famous just for being famous. These crushes would no doubt be strongest in the teenage years. This is the case for Rylee (Hallett), who idolises and dreams of meeting Norwegian pop star Payton Adler (Tømmeraas) who fronts the band Floorplan. His music speaks to her on a deep emotional level, and it also doesn’t hurt that he is outrageously good-looking.
Sweetness, playing at Fantasia International Film Festival, takes the saying never meet your heroes and flips it to never meet your fans. Rylee is not a popular kid at school; she has a very small group of friends and cops a little bit of bullying. Her mother died not too long ago, and her father Ron (Chatwin) is struggling with how to deal with his own grief and raise Rylee, which means Rylee is going through being a teenager, dealing with high school hell and processing her unresolved grief, and is ostensively left to navigate this herself. When Floorplan lands in her hometown for a concert, she, of course, goes to the concert along with her friend Sid (Furukawa), and after a miscommunication, Rylee ends up stuck there with no way home. As fate demands, she meets her crush, or rather, he accidently hits her with his car. Payton offers her a ride home, and she jumps at the chance. Things take a turn when Payton decides to stop off on the way, to a feed his drug habit, and then subsequently nearly kills both Rylee and himself in a near car accident. Rylee takes him back to her home and so begins a forced detox and will keep it a secret at almost any cost…
It is not long before Rylee’s inner thoughts become actions. A crush becomes an obsession, and the perception of events becomes skewed to suit her own narrative. When her fantasy and reality collide, Rylee tries to remake reality the way she sees it.
Hallett’s portrayal of Rylee is beautifully nuanced. Tiny in stature, but you never, ever doubt that she can do some of the things that she does, hitting the perfect sullen teen notes whilst still managing to elicit sympathy. Tømmeraas’ Payton is a spot on, if not almost cliched, portrayal of a pop star. The substance abuse problems, the manipulation of people around him, and of course the self-loathing, but Tømmeraas makes the most of it, saving Payton from being a one-note character. Furukawa and Hallett have good chemistry as best friends and Chatwin who plays Rylee’s father, plays him as an emotionally closed up man, who’d rather take on a thousand weekend shifts than have a real conversation with his kid, if he even knew what to say.
Cinematographer Mat Barkley, creates a great looking film, the moments that feature Payton Adler on stage, is where you can see director Emma Higgins’ experience in music videos coming to the fore because the way these sequences are shot, really brings you into how Rylee sees his on-stage persona. Even when we go back to the banality of the suburbs, it presents as muted colours on the outside despite what is going on behind closed doors.
Emma Higgins has created something new from material that has already been mined many times; however, Sweetness manages to be something different, and the ending subverts expectations. Unhinged and heartbreaking, Sweetness is anything but.
Played at the Fantasia International Film Festival
Ryan Morrissey-Smith
Leave a Reply