Candy Heart Heist
2025 · 25m
Directed by Dave Shecter
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
A lonely, shoplifting teenager flees the cops after stealing a heart-shaped box of candy and hides in a diner booth across from a mysterious older stranger, whose shocking secret and hard-won advice force her to imagine a different future.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise looks like comfort-food coming-of-age until that stranger's secret lands, which is exactly when most films chicken out—Shecter doesn't, and the result is genuinely unsettling in a way that makes you recalibrate what you thought you were watching.
A formally assured entry in the diner-booth-confession lineage (Nightcrawler, Boyhood's formal restraint), where the editing rhythm and two-shot staging do the heavy lifting that dialogue won't—the kind of considered mise-en-scène that rewards a second viewing.
The entire film pivots on the casting and performance choice of that stranger—one wrong note of sentiment or explanation and the whole architecture collapses, but the restraint and specificity of that performance is what makes the teenager's recalibration feel earned rather than imposed.
Reviews
Set between comedy and drama scenes, this one creates room for introspection, regret, and crucially for Amber, a way to imagine the future. The film benefits from its comic scenes even if and especially because Amber does not have a word of humour or levity to her character.