J Paul Johnson
The indie horror film Sweet Relief takes its name from a fictional internet challenge with the highest of stakes. To accept the challenge, gone viral in and around the small New England town where the film is set, is to nominate someone for murder. If selected, the player must either murder their nominee or be killed themselves. That such a challenge could exist at all, much less go viral and inspire teens to kill, would have seemed unfathomable a generation ago, but we live today in a post-Slender Man world: a decade ago, two teen girls in Wisconsin lured their friend into a wooded park and stabbed her 19 times to appease their fictional supernatural hero.
Director-writer-producer Nick Verdi’s Sweet Relief does not adapt the specifics of the Slender Man creepypasta meme, or the stabbings and subsequent moral panic that followed in its wake, but it surely borrows its main conceit from that episode. In the film’s initial scene, three teens lure a fourth to a house at the behest of their masked internet influencer and stab her to death without remorse. Curiously, from there, Sweet Relief largely ignores this precipitating murder case and its victim, settling into a character study of one of their families who find their lives disrupted by their community’s viral fascination with the “Sweet Relief” challenge.
For much of the remainder of the film’s 87-minute runtime, the three teen killers—Hannah (Lucie Rosenfeld), Lily (Jocelyn Lopez), and Corey (Catie Dupont)—fade into the background as the story centers more on Hannah’s family. Her mother Deborah (Jane Karakula) is unaware of Hannah’s involvement but is obsessed with the phenomenon more generally, her fears worked into a lather by next-door neighbor Mr. McDaniel (Paul Lazar of Silence of the Lambs), a high school teacher eager to profess his theories both online and in conversation.
Deborah’s monomania has her son and Hannah’s brother Nathan (Adam Michael Kozak) equally upset; his live-in girlfriend Jess (Alisa Leigh) is burnt out at work and by their dead-end relationship. Looking for some peace of mind in the nearby woods, Jess finds herself playing private detective when she spies a local man—a middle-aged blowhard named Gerald (B.R. Yeager), who in other scenes we’ve seen pretends to be in law enforcement and grooms a young teenage boy (Gianni Passiglia)—with a mummified body in a duffel bag. For a time, Jess makes for a credible if common horror-genre heroine, earnestly pursuing her suspect and evading capture, and Leigh’s performance is the standout in a film dogged by some inconsistent acting.
Jess’s plight as she pursues and is then pursued by Gerald has little to do with the titular “Sweet Relief” game that motivates the film’s plot and theme. It’s just “there”: adjacent, but not really connected to, the primary narrative conceit, and not really informing or even relating to it in any substantive way, except that as the film nears its conclusion, Jess also faces off against the teen trio of “Sweet Relief” killers of the film’s opening scene.
Were Sweet Relief to work a bit better, it would be easy to overlook that point. Even a no-budget mumblegore horror thriller can bring plenty of cinematic inventiveness to the party (a quarter-century ago, another no-budget film set in the New England woods would create a phenomenon doing just that). But too often, a long take will draw dull dialogue out in a single static shot that places a premium on the actors’ abilities to convey emotions that simply aren’t conveyed. The film’s runtime is less than 90 minutes but feels much longer.
The sound recording—often the bugaboo of no-budget filmmaking—is more than occasionally problematic: sometimes what characters say can’t be heard because they mumble, sometimes because the jarring, genre-shifting musical score (by Renato Montenegro) drowns them out. At times, some simple basic conventions of blocking and cinematography go awry: when Jess spies Gerald digging in the forest, the camera perspectives make it seem like she’d be plainly in his eyesight, though his character remains oblivious.
There’s nothing better than when a writer-director-producer is working on the cheap and making the most of scant resources. To its credit, Sweet Relief has the seed of a thoughtful film, one that takes the effects of social media seriously and doesn’t kowtow to clichéd genre tropes or limitations. The script, though, feels like two—perhaps three—separate short films soldered together by a culminating act of violence involving most of the principals.
When Sweet Relief reaches its denouement, it brings out its very longest of long takes, a five-minute-long static shot of two characters that have the least to do with the narrative up to that point. To what point or purpose the camera lingers to this length is not clear: it feels a bit like there really is no ending or meaning to be taken from what’s happened before and the camera is as unsure of what to do or where to go as we are. It’s an arthouse move, to be sure, but it doesn’t provide either resolution or insight. It just sits, there, static, ongoing, which is, I suppose, its own kind of point. If there exists a solution to the social-media inculcation of the young towards inexplicable violence, Sweet Relief has none; sadly, as a culture, neither, apparently, do we.
Sweet Relief is currently available to stream on VOD from Eventive.
