Run Sweetheart Run. I Get It, But Can We Not?

The Mother of Movies is all for metaphorical storylines. I am partial to a hidden agenda and also generally keen for women-forward championing films that come blowing in from time to time in furious tornado bursts. Titles like Promising Young Woman, Bombshell, and even Revenge get their point across while mostly having a good time. I have seen the more than enthusiastic gusto some movie lovers have taken to pro-woman, feminist narratives. Run Sweetheart Run is a 2022 release and also really wants you to understand what women want.

More importantly, I too understood Run Sweetheart Run. I know that everything about this screams that “sometimes men are simply predators who form alliances while trying to use their wiles to invade the girl.” And when I say girl, I know this phrase takes a backseat to others like Sweetheart, Sugar, or Darling. And I understand how this forms, in part, how society condescendingly addresses women in general.

Running The Menstruation Cup in Run Sweetheart Run

I applaud how Run Sweetheart Run barrels along like some kind of Public Service Announcement in how it has been stitched together. It’s clever, witty, bloody, and taut. Performances are everything you could want from a film of this caliber. Ella Balinska, who plays Cherie is true to the heroic nature of her character. She takes plenty of punches convincingly along the way.

Run Sweetheart Run is a horror and psychological thriller movie with plenty of blindly callous kills from its perpetrator, Ethan (Pilou Asbæk.) Ethan brilliantly embodies everything we hate about the male side of humanity. This antagonist is disguised as some kind of God, protected by men, and feared by women. Vicious Vampire allies who feed his soul an endless stream of beautiful, innovative, and unique women. His agenda, purely to “have” them comes across as quite the iconic and dumbed-down epitome of how it feels to be hunted.

With all the accolades this title deserves, comes some criticism, however. Run Sweetheart Run has some aesthetic flaws in its use of the tampon and bloodletting it so freely prescribes. I certainly queried plenty of user-related and other questions about the film overall. Plausibility in some of Cherie’s actions had me bemused and perplexed. For example, the thought crossed my mind that there was some kind of female sanitary item shortage across the city. Was this universe created so that one simply had to bleed on people’s floors?

How Often Period Blood Can Be Used Against Us

From the very beginning, I thought way too long and hard about why Cherie couldn’t buy a tampon on the way to her significant business dinner. Instead, she opted to bleed on this man’s tiles. This was followed by failure to solve the issue in the bathroom. Even jailbirds have been known to rectify the ever-pressing issue of what to do when you haven’t got the required equipment to stop Aunt Flo from recklessly ending up on someone’s polished ceramic.

And while some people I know who watched the film talked of a nonstop rush of adrenaline I could only discuss the sheer absurdity contained therein. How was Cherie able to remove and fling a tampon in full use with one hand while wearing pants? It reminded me of those magicians with magic velcro sides that can easily and quickly remove the whole bottom half of their wardrobe.

Only Cherie didn’t have such magic pants and I wondered if she was actually a magician. Questions of movie validity usually only arise in specialty areas. Things like law, medicine, or the correct way to hold and shoot a gun are more often than not the prized topics when it comes to technical realness in film. One would like to think, tampons are a relatively easy area to navigate. For me, I was left, surprised filmmakers overlooked this aspect here.

Menstruation Underwear

Nonetheless, Run Sweetheart Run is a pretty unique instrument in portraying feminism using menstruation. Not the first film of its kind thanks to movies like Ginger Snaps and Raw but still a fantastic use of the taboo topic of a woman’s period. What’s more, the majority liked this film a lot. I was left a little in the grey area of just not buying what this title was selling. Or perhaps, I’ve just overdosed on feminism in movies this year.

Run Sweetheart Run is rated

3 tampons should be free out of 5

Paste Magazine has a review of Run, Sweetheart Run as well.

Run Sweetheart Run is cast with Ella Balinska, Pilou Asbæk, Clark Gregg, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and Dayo Okeniyi.

Written and Directed by Shana Feste. Additional writing by Keith Josef Adkins and Kellee Terrell.