Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl

‘Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl’ Review: Subtle Art Horror

'Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl'

Movie Rating:

3

Have you been desperate to see a contemporary horror film as much influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’ as ‘Paranormal Activity’? Good news, ‘Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl’ is the meditation on identity and duality with a spook-out finale you’ve been waiting for! Everyone else will likely get bored about halfway through, but those who wait and know what they’re getting should be creepily satiated.

Erin Wilhelmi stars as Adele, a young girl who has been dispatched by her uncaring mother to care for her shut-in aunt Dora (Frances Eve). It’s not exactly a friendly atmosphere. The older woman barely leaves her room, communicating to the young girl through handwritten notes slipped under her door, usually with a scolding or dismissive tone. Adele doesn’t do well and finds herself wandering the small town streets all alone, desperate for something to do and someone to connect with. That’s when she becomes fascinated with the dark and mysterious Beth (Quinn Shepard). Beth’s one of those young women driven by an odd mixture of cynicism and intuition, not particularly friendly but irresistible nonetheless. Yet she’s instantly fascinated with Adele, curious to find out who the mysterious new arrival might be and even more curious to find out if the local legends about Dora’s creaky old mansion are true.

Essentially, the movie is a modern update of a Gothic melodrama, filled with the usual repressed romance, class obsession, creaky architecture, and mysterious supernatural forces of the genre. But it’s also not particularly modern. Writer/director A.D. Calvo set the film in the early 1980s and shot it in the style of that period, with a fetishist attention to detail reminiscent of ‘The House of the Devil‘. Much like that Ti West flick, even though the setting is the ’80s, the style of the film is stolen from the ’70s… just let it go.

What we have here is a movie more influenced by other movies and literature than life. It’s an exercise in style, homage and ambiguity that will really only work for those familiar with all the forms that Calvo apes. Fortunately, he apes them pretty well. The movie is dripping with slow-burn atmosphere, creeping zooms, subtle manipulative sound design, compounded symbolism, and many other tropes of arty genre flicks of the past. Thankfully, the director is at least good at combining effective cinematic elements, even if he’s not the greatest at crafting a narrative.

The main characters are more dramatic types than humans, but the lead actresses play them well. Erin Wilhelmi creates an impossible innocent burdened by people-pleasing neurosis, desperate to discover the world yet afraid to put herself out there. Quinn Shepard is charming, charismatic, cynical, and knows it all in a way that suggests deep psychological damage. Together, they form a bond that stretches beyond friendship without becoming exploitative or genuinely romantic. It’s another one of the movie’s mysteries. Their identities merge and blur as they investigate a somewhat supernatural mystery about the house that’s never quite explained. Ambiguity rules the day once the film shifts out of slow-burn atmosphere and arty symbolic storytelling and into more spooky shenanigans. We never quite know what the big revelation behind the house is or why the two characters are so inexplicably drawn to it, but plenty of possibilities are provided for those who want to draw their own conclusions.

‘Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl’ is a strange concoction. Those coming for the haunted house thrills might feel let down by how long they take to arrive and how ambiguous they are. Those looking for art house identity questioning will undoubtedly feel like all the scares in the final act are a cheap thrills copout. However, those who like genre thrills that are a little offbeat or like their art flicks tinged with thrills will enjoy the sweet spot that Calvo stumbles into. This isn’t a perfect movie on any level, but it’s so well crafted and so intriguing in its mash-up style that it’s easy to get lost in it for a trim 76 minutes, even if there’s not quite as much to consider once the credits roll as the filmmakers would like you to think is there.

Half-baked art house horror is still better than fully-baked crap horror. At least Calvo attempted something interesting here. Hopefully, next time he’ll spend as much time writing the script as he does meticulously planning the shots. The balance isn’t quite right this time.

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