Movie Review: SWEET RELIEF

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: June 27th, 2025 / 05:55 PM

SWEET RELIEF movie poster | ©2025 Art Brut Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Alisa Leigh, B.R. Yeager, Adam Michael Kozak, Lucie Rosenfeld, Jocelyn Lopez, Catie Dupont, Erica Pinto, Daniel James Cashman, Gianni Passiglia, Cooper B. Handy, Joey Ogden, Jimmy Laine, Jane Karakula, Paul Lazar
Writer: Nick Verdi
Director: Nick Verdi
Distributor: Art Brut Films
Release Date: June 27, 2025 (theatrical, Eventive VOD)

SWEET RELIEF takes its title from an online murder challenge game. While it’s not exactly what happened in real life with “Slender Man,” it’s in that general vicinity: an invented online supernatural myth that spreads and encourages harm.

Hannah (Lucie Rosenfeld) enlists her besties, Lily (Jocelyn Lopez) and Corey (Catie Dupont), to play the “Sweet Relief game by urging them to “choose one person you want to die.” So far, not much worse than an average gripe session between pals, so Lily and Corey have little trouble with it.

But then the game goes on to demand that the players, after declaring their desires, follow through – and if they don’t, the “Sweet Angel” (a mysterious masked figure) will kill them instead.

Hannah’s mother Deborah (Jane Karakula) doesn’t know about her daughter’s involvement with the game, but she’s plenty worked up about its possible dangerous effect. This is largely due to conversations with next-door neighbor Mr. McDaniel (Paul Lazar), the high school science teacher, who shares his convictions about all this interpersonally and on social media.

Hannah’s brother Nathan (Adam Michael Kozak) thinks Mr. McDaniel is putting crazy ideas in his mom’s head. Nathan’s live-in girlfriend Jess (Alisa Leigh), a nurse, is so worn out by workplace stress that she doesn’t have the ability to contemplate much else.

In a separate plot thread that will eventually weave into this through a circuitous route, middle-aged Gerald (B.R. Yeager) likes to pretend he’s with law enforcement and seems to be grooming accepting young Kyle (Gianni Passiglia).

Writer/director Nick Verdi is onto something intriguing here, although his love of medium and long shots seems like he’s trying to say something with the framing that works against the impact. We get that the characters are disaffected and disconnected from what’s happening and from each other; we’d still like to see them better.

Contrasting composer Renato Montenegro’s alternately folky and upbeat pop score with the matter-of-fact grim action is a good touch. So is the disturbing practicality with which SWEET RELIEF depicts brutal violence.

There’s a problem with coincidence and proximity once we understand more about the game.

But an even bigger issue is that we don’t actively like anyone. There are only a few characters we come close to hating, and even with them, it’s hard to get worked up. We don’t know enough about anybody to have strong feelings.

This is not uncommon in horror movies, but there’s usually propulsion that fills in the gaps. SWEET RELIEF describes itself in its advertising as a “mumblegore” thriller – yes, that’s now a subgenre – which means we can expect a low budget and lots of dialogue, but it doesn’t require this great a remove from the people involved.

Here, things move slowly enough for us to ask lots of questions. For starters, while Hannah, Lily and Corey are young women, they’re not so young that we can buy how they possibly suppose nobody is going to suspect them of their crimes (they post their intentions in the game and kill people they know). We don’t gain insight as we spend more time we them, we just start to feel exasperated.

SWEET RELIEF has some clever notions and decent filmmaking flourishes, but it’s also under ninety minutes and still lags in its pacing.

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