“Sweetness” (2025) is about sixteen-year-old Rylee Hill (Kate Hallett) who is obsessed with Payton Adler (Herman Tømmeraas), the lead singer for Floorplan, because she believes that he helped her get through the hardest time of her life. When she runs into him after his concert on Friday, March 29th, she realizes that he fell off the wagon and decides to help him go cold turkey whether he wants to or not. Her best friend, Sidney (Aya Furukawa), reluctantly helps, but has reservations because it is not normal to handcuff a man to a bed in a suburban home. Writer and director Emma Higgins’ sophomore feature shows promise but falls short in terms of pacing and sticking the landing.
Hallett is a strong actor even though “Sweetness” is only her second film after “Women Talking” (2022). Even if the audience does not receive what they are conveying, Hallett and Higgins seem to understand Rylee, her psychological profile and her character arc. If Higgins had devoted more time to why Rylee’s classmates bully her or establishing the normal school ecosystem, it may have helped because the bullying could be because they are right; she is different but innocent, i.e. they are mean to her; or they are mean to everyone. Taking a page from “Eighth Grade” (2018) and “Didi” (2024), she learns how to navigate social hurdles with YouTube. The headboard of her bed is decorated like an altar to Payton, and she practices the YouTube lessons like a prayer to Payton. He is her personal idol. By listening to his music, she disassociates and ignores reality, which is excellent practice when she goes into full psychosis. Hallett does a great job completely seething with fury whenever someone does not act the way that she wants. Rylee mixes up her attraction to the idealized image and revulsion over the reality. If Rylee is frightening, it is how quickly she escalates situations and knows how to spin it. Hallett sounds reasonable and has a baby face, but the way that she navigates the world is dangerous.
Tømmeraas looks the part and does fine with the material but his character is severely underwritten. Hallett needed to decide if she wanted to make him a full person or stay rigidly focused on Rylee’s perspective. As it is, Payton’s musings about the demands of fame and his reliance on drugs feels thin. Also, the music is not memorable, and it would have been nice if the lyrics vaguely resonated in a way that aligned theoretically with Rylee’s feelings. “Singing in My Sleep” (2024) had such a great soundtrack that it was easier to believe that the rock star was a sensation. The best part about Payton was how he was always ready to fight back and did not care that two little girls had kidnapped him. He treats them like grown men as he should. All bets are off when someone breaks the law.
Furukawa does a great job as the boy crazy voice of reason. Sidney is a great foil for Sidney because even if she does not initially act like a best friend and is a severely flawed character, she is a normal teenage girl who understands that a home is not a rehab center. She also shows what the appropriate emotion reaction is to the situation that they are in. The range is impressive as she goes from neglectful friend to ride or die to horrified realization. Higgins nails this character.
Ron Hill (Justin Chatwin) is another underdeveloped character. One day, he is a vaguely normal dad. The next day, he is treating Rylee like a kitten who needs to be moved, which is a random note that feels vaguely physically abusive, but is a one-off moment. It probably says more about his character that he does not play a pivotal role in his daughter’s life and is relegated to the margins of the story. His girlfriend, Marnie (Amanda Brugel), is more interesting in her brief screentime, and if she was in “Sweetness” more, it would have been better. The story is at its strongest and scariest when Rylee faces reality, and Brugel is the most normal, relatable person in the movie. While the teens understandably cringe at her encouragement and enthusiastic attempts to relate to them, she is the most functional adult. Like Sidney, she is a great foil for Payton and Ron and shows the bar for how adults should treat Rylee. Also, Marnie is the closest that anyone gets to see what doing the right thing looks like. Implicitly she is also the only grown woman that exists in Rylee’s personal life.
John (Steven Ogg) handles Payton. Higgins either needed to entirely exclude him as a character or show more of his search for his missing rock star. Like Marnie, John is fairly relatable as someone who is concerned and protective but also understands that Payton is a grown man who tends to be unpredictable, and his primary job is to handle the business side. Ogg made a solid impression and cultivated this anticipation of when he would turn up not necessarily to save the day, but to heighten the tension.
It felt as if Higgins put her thumb too heavily on the scale in Rylee’s favor. There is at least one witness who saw her and Payton together, but that never comes up. There are some great sequences that feel like location shots to establish the neighborhood vibe, time and day of the week, but they end up being pivotal to explain why no one notices when Payton attempts to escape. Instead, it becomes this coming-of-age story where Rylee comes into her own and begins to stand up for herself, but unlike Carrie, it is not satisfying, and it feels more like a cha cha. She stands up against a bully then becomes a spectacle for the whole school to gawk at. Maybe that is Higgins point. Rylee’s delusions are harmful, not empowering, regardless of what she thinks or the outcome.
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Payton said that his greatest ambition is to make an impact as an artist, and Rylee feels as if she succeeded, but it also feels as if she would fall apart if he did not exist. It is heavily implied that Payton triggered Rylee because of the person who killed her mom, but Rylee is not in touch with her displaced desire for revenge. It feels as if ithis internal conflict is the missing ingredient or antidote to Rylee not falling apart without more Payton music. “Sweetness” is way better than “Hurry Up Tomorrow” (2025) because Higgins prioritizes Rylee’s story instead of making a psychological metaphor but falls short of reaching “Lurker” (2025) levels of satisfaction with the ending. It was a nice shot to show that the last real person in Rylee’s life is in the process of falling apart and becoming the kind of person that she subconsciously hates the most. It is a happy ending with a real bad ending promise off screen in the future.
