Sweetness is Misery for the streaming age, a candy-coated nightmare about love, grief, and the monster hiding in plain sight on your bedroom wall.
Sweetness
When a superfan learns that her rock-star idol is spiraling into addiction, she makes it her mission to save him, whether he wants her help or not. However, when her desperate plan spins out of control, she kidnaps him in a delusional attempt to fix him. What started as compassion soon turns into captivity as she locks him away in the name of love.
Initial release: 7 March 2025
Director: Emma Higgins
Pop star obsession has always been fertile ground for horror, from the German expressionist nightmares of the 1980s to today’s wave of fandom-focused thrillers. With the rise of parasocial relationships in the social media age, filmmakers are finding fresh terror in the gap between idol and admirer—a gap that, for some, becomes a portal to something far darker.
In 1982, German director Eckhart Schmidt unleashed Der Fan upon unsuspecting audiences—a hallucinatory technopop nightmare about a teenage girl whose devotion to a new wave singer spirals into unspeakable territory. That film remains a cult touchstone, a weird and uncomfortable ride that anticipated the cannibalistic extremes of Audition by nearly two decades. Now, music video director Emma Higgins enters similar thematic territory with her feature debut, Sweetness, though she trades Schmidt’s surreal European sensibility for something more grounded, more suburban, and in many ways more unsettling precisely because of its believability.
Higgins arrives with considerable genre credentials, having directed music videos for artists like Tegan and Sara while cutting her teeth across Canada’s film industry . That background proves essential. Sweetness understands the glossy machinery of pop stardom from the inside, lending authenticity to its portrait of a troubled teen whose love for a fictional band called Floorplan becomes something far more dangerous. The film premiered at SXSW 2025 to immediate comparisons with Stephen King’s Misery, though Higgins brings a distinctly contemporary, Gen-Z sensibility to the captivity thriller formula.
As we enter an era where “stanning” has been normalised and parasocial boundaries blur daily, Sweetness arrives at precisely the right moment. Here’s our review.
Sweetness Review: This Pop Star Horror Movie Will Make You Rethink Fandom
A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
Back in 1982, German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt released The Fan, a horror thriller about a teenage girl obsessed with a pop music star. It’s a wild, weird, uncomfortable technopop ride, and I admit I expected (hoped?) Emma Higgins’s Sweetness would be a kind of American update.
Because The Fan is so very weird, yet somehow relatable.
Higgins’s film is very different, and a touch more on the believable side. Kate Hallett (Women Talking) is Rylee, unpopular high school kid with an obsessive crush on Floorplan lead singer Payton Adler (Herman Tømmeraas). His pouty pretty face covers nearly every inch of her bedroom walls and ceiling. Her headphones are always in, his emotional vocals drowning out the mean girls in class, her father’s overly eager girlfriend (Amanda Brugel), and everything else Rylee doesn’t want to hear.
When bestie Sidney (Aya Furukawa, Fall of the House of Usher) leaves Rylee behind after a Floorplan concert, she meanders alone until being struck by a car driven by the very impaired object of her affection, Payton Adler!
Totally worth it!
What follows is a crooked path lined with the faulty logic of the young and the twisted imagination of a filmmaker who’s spent most of her career embedded with pop stars. Higgins has directed scads of music videos. That’s probably why the music for this film is so unnervingly authentic, exactly the kind of thing that would make a troubled teen swoon and believe her life had been saved.
Even if she’d, in fact, just been run down by a car.
Furukawa and Tømmeraas both shine, one as a semi-vacuous but still good friend, the other as a good-looking opportunist with a drug problem.
Hallett anchors the film with a sort of wide-eyed yet world wearied performance that’s as heartbreaking as it is frustrating.
Higgins never laughs at or Rylee and her youthful obsession. Though the movie doesn’t wallow in the maudlin, avoiding angst at all possible turns, the filmmaker demands that we empathize with this girl in a way that’s both moving and nightmarish.
Stylish cinematography and slick production design emphasize the pop music stylings, but the film is hardly all glossy exterior.
There are some telegraphed moments and a couple of convenient contrivances, and anybody seriously shocked by Rylee’s choices definitely needs to see The Fan. But there’s a twisted, broken little heart here and Higgins and Hallett want you to witness it.
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