While many films, including some of its festival mates at the Chattanooga Film Festival this year, regurgitate some of David Lynch's images and ideas, Sweet Relief offers something comparable to, rather than derivative of the master of modern dark surrealism.
Directed by Nick Verdi, Sweet Relief sits perfectly between the dive into the darkness lurking beneath the perfectly manicured lawns of the suburbs in Blue Velvet and the exploration of how exurban emptiness drives young people to find meaning online in Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going To the World's Fair.
The film takes its time to cohere, but in its early moments, Sweet Relief plays more like a portrait of a place and its various people than any narrative.
An unexplained online video shows a group of teens pull a knife on another as a man in a rat mask stands ominously in the background. A group of three teenage friends talk about who they'd kill as one urges the other two to participate in an online game, the details of which we're only clued into later.
Another teen meets a walking red flag of a man who makes promises about getting the high schooler into the police force when he graduates because "I'm a real good guy to know." In the middle of this, there's a surprisingly standard family drama about a mentally ill mother, the adult son who has moved out, and the teenage daughter (the one urging the others to play the game in the first scene) left behind as the sole target of her mother's wrath.
Taking obvious inspiration from the all too real social media "challenges" that have led to injury and death, Sweet Relief imagines a social media challenge that urges teens to kill. Of course, the game creates a moral panic among parents and middle-aged members of the community. Those not old enough to fall into moral panics, and not young enough to participate in the challenges, wave it off as a hoax meant to lead the susceptible into the darker and wider ranging conspiracy theories the internet has to offer (QAnon is referenced at least once).
What makes the film exceptional is its refusal to fall into any specific genre. Far from the slasher the premise would inspire in studio hands, Sweet Relief is almost mundane. Despite the bursts of brutal violence, shocking images of corpses, and an extended sequence of a young woman alone in the woods that's nail-bitingly tense, the film is never exactly scary, so much as deeply disconcerting.
Even the aspects of the film that grate somewhat contribute to the stew that makes it so troubling. The son Nathan (Adam Michael Kozak) of the mentally-ill mother develops an obsession with her obsession about the challenge, annoying his girlfriend and the audience with his incessant talk of how stupid the whole thing is.
But it's the kind of annoying we've all experienced, and it makes the horrors of the film feel more threatening because they exist in the same world as this tedious talk that's part of our everyday lives (well, hopefully not every day). Gerald (author B.R. Yeager), the creep at the center of many of the film's unanswered questions, uses "fuck" so often that it's likely both Yeager using it as a filler word while he thinks of his next improvised line and Gerald ensuring everyone listening that he's capable of violence.
Yet there's more to Sweet Relief than a masterfully anxiety-inducing look at how the internet has only made the darkness of the suburbs darker. There's also an indictment of the kinds of people who make the real violence enacted against others into something purely abstract, an object of "discourse" to be debated in the marketplace of ideas. The film's longest dialogue scene sees the character who may well have created the challenge respond condescendingly to someone who is desperately attempting to genuinely engage with them, albeit from a place of anger.
Sweet Relief may well be an anti-social media PSA, but it's not like any PSA we've seen before, which might just make it effective propaganda, and certainly makes it a fascinating film.