Sweetness
by Hope Madden
Back in 1982, German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt released The Fan, a horror thriller about a teenage girl obsessed with a pop music star. It’s a wild, weird, uncomfortable technopop ride, and I admit I expected (hoped?) Emma Higgins’s Sweetness would be a kind of American update.
Because The Fan is so very weird, yet somehow relatable.
Higgins’s film is very different, and a touch more on the believable side. Kate Hallett (Women Talking) is Rylee, unpopular high school kid with an obsessive crush on Floorplan lead singer Payton Adler (Herman Tømmeraas). His pouty pretty face covers nearly every inch of her bedroom walls and ceiling. Her headphones are always in, his emotional vocals drowning out the mean girls in class, her father’s overly eager girlfriend (Amanda Brugel), and everything else Rylee doesn’t want to hear.
When bestie Sidney (Aya Furukawa, Fall of the House of Usher) leaves Rylee behind after a Floorplan concert, she meanders alone until being struck by a car driven by the very impaired object of her affection, Payton Adler!
Totally worth it!
What follows is a crooked path lined with the faulty logic of the young and the twisted imagination of a filmmaker who’s spent most of her career embedded with pop stars. Higgins has directed scads of music videos. That’s probably why the music for this film is so unnervingly authentic, exactly the kind of thing that would make a troubled teen swoon and believe her life had been saved.
Even if she’d, in fact, just been run down by a car.
Furukawa and Tømmeraas both shine, one as a semi-vacuous but still good friend, the other as a good-looking opportunist with a drug problem.
Hallett anchors the film with a sort of wide-eyed yet world wearied performance that’s as heartbreaking as it is frustrating.
Higgins never laughs at or Rylee and her youthful obsession. Though the movie doesn’t wallow in the maudlin, avoiding angst at all possible turns, the filmmaker demands that we empathize with this girl in a way that’s both moving and nightmarish.
Stylish cinematography and slick production design emphasize the pop music stylings, but the film is hardly all glossy exterior.
There are some telegraphed moments and a couple of convenient contrivances, and anybody seriously shocked by Rylee’s choices definitely needs to see The Fan. But there’s a twisted, broken little heart here and Higgins and Hallett want you to witness it.
