New film Sweetness follows Rylee, played by Kate Hallett, a teenager who doesn't have much going on in her small-town life except an ever-growing focus on a Harry Styles-like rock star named Payton.Elevation Pictures
Sweetness
Written and directed by Emma Higgins
Starring Kate Hallett, Herman Tommeraas and Justin Chatwin
Classification N/A; 93 minutes
Opens in select theatres March 6
Critic’s Pick
Obsession can be a deceptively easy theme for a filmmaker to pick apart. The inherent highs are dizzying, the crushing lows are unbearable – and the desire to explore the tension in between those two states is a natural inclination, equipped with its own cliched cinematic language. Yet Canadian filmmaker Emma Higgins finds a new, serrated edge to the theme of compulsive fixation with Sweetness, her feature directorial debut.
A movie that is half locked-room thriller, half enjoyably bitter coming-of-age drama, Higgins’s film zeroes in on what can happen when young people grow up in an environment that encourages, even rewards obsession.
At the centre of the film is the teenage Rylee (Kate Hallett), who does not have much going on in her small-town life except an ever-growing focus on a Harry Styles-like rock star named Payton (Herman Tommeraas). But her desires for Payton – as an object to possess and maybe even control, more than an artist to admire or a person to lust after – escalate in a dangerous and morbidly fascinating way after the idol plays a show nearby.
How new Canadian thriller Sweetness digs into the depths of fandom
Through a series of somewhat contrived circumstances – Higgins’s script stumbles in the set-up before regaining its footing – Payton ends up a prisoner in Rylee’s home, where she anticipates “curing” him of his drug addiction. What sounds like an elevator pitch for Almost Famous meets Misery with a dash of Trap gradually metastasizes into something more surprising.
Although most of the film’s action is kept to Rylee’s home, which is ostensibly run by her well-meaning but oblivious father (Justin Chatwin), Higgins is careful to build up the economically and spiritually depressed, go-nowhere environment that fostered her antihero’s compulsions.
From Rylee’s oppressively anodyne school to the patches of chilly, slowly fading town explored by Payton’s manager (Steven Ogg) as he searches for his missing client, Higgins uses the surroundings of North Bay, Ont., to stand in for any anonymous North American city that finds itself gradually losing itself to forces beyond its control, and the people inside of it.
The film might not land as well as it does, though, without Hallett. Best known until now for Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, the Alberta performer finds just the right balance between naivety and mania, ensuring that Rylee is just sympathetic enough to make her compelling instead of simply repulsive. We want to genuinely understand the damage that she’s endured to get to such a dark place. It’s Misery, sure, but it’s easy to love the company.