Sweetheart
2016 · 27m
Directed by Miguel Angelo Pate
Genres: coming-of-age, horror, sci-fi
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
After a mysterious extraterrestrial event turns adults violent, a young girl tries to protect herself and her baby brother.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Sci-fi apocalypse through a kid's eyes sounds like every YA dystopia premise ever, but Pate's refusal to explain the event—just lets it *happen*—strips away the usual exposition theater and leaves you stranded in pure survival dread.
The film positions itself intelligently within post-Spielbergian child-in-crisis cinema, but what lingers is the formal restraint: how much catastrophe Pate withholds from frame, how the editing respects the girl's limited understanding rather than pandering to omniscient viewers.
The entire weight of this film rests on the decision to shoot most scenes from the girl's eye level or below, making every adult a towering threat—that single spatial choice transforms a familiar premise into something genuinely claustrophobic and makes 27 minutes feel inescapable.
Reviews
Visually ambitious, quick and discomfiting in style, this opening reflects the modus operandi of the film in much the same way, situating a character study of innocence and heartbreak against a larger panorama of dystopian anarchy and chaos. It makes SWEETHEART a difficult, brutal coming-of-age in a desolate, hopeless world — and perhaps a heightened, intense parable for the experiences of children helpless to affect the world around them.