Reviewed by Alicia Glass
A small New England town hides several instances of insidious violence, all eventually interconnected through an online murder challenge that turns devastatingly real!
Listen, we all know the feeling of being utterly bored by our existence, especially as teenagers, and the lure of these newfangled online challenges, the darker the better. But when the challenges suddenly hop up off the screen and start leaving instructions and weapons designed for murder next to us while we’re sleeping, it might be time to rethink your online interests. Make sure your animal mask is securely covering your whole head, and lets dive into this!
So Hannah (Lucie Rosenfeld) seems to be the leader of our little trio of girlfriends, and she likes to edgelord things as much as possible, goading her friends Corey (Catie DuPont) and Lily (Jocelyn Lopez) into taking part in the Sweet Relief online challenge where you make a video of someone in your life you’d like to see dead, and apparently hope that you’re not one of the chosen, to carry out such actions in real life. Lily’s choice is of course a lame typical teenager response – her babysitter, who never let Lily do any of the cool stuff she wanted to. Corey is a fair bit more dark, in that she’d like to see her ex-boyfriend, who cheated on her and broke her little heart, get himself stabbed through the heart, by her own hand. And we all just kind of assume that Hannah’s answer would be her overly protective and paranoid and odd-acting mother, for reasons that will become apparent shortly.
It’s not terribly long at all before we’re treated to our trio committing their first hands-on murder, ostensibly because they’re all been chosen, and are terrified of the potential consequences if they refuse to take murder into their own hands. Being stalked by someone in a full-head animal mask, apparently watching to make sure they carry out these murders but also hovering nearby with a silent threat of what will happen to them if they don’t, is a fully unnerving experience, and we the audience are nervous for them as the masked person does his best Michael Meyers impression throughout.
Cut (no pun intended, yet) to an older man, Gerald (B.R. Yeager), who clearly has pedophile written all over his smarmy self, talking to a much younger guy, Eli (Cooper B. Handy), that he seems to have engaged as his informant in the neighborhood, to report on any wrongdoings the local kids may be committing. Gerald kinda sorta claims to be some sort of policeman-ish type person and of course is willing to mentor young Eli in this regard, nudging his dreams of being a hero and kicking bad guy ass. The way these two interact, especially in the initial informant scene, is very reminiscent of real life serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and how he would lure handsome young men to his amorous, and then murderous, clutches.
Then we have Hannah’s older brother Nathan (Adam Michael Kozak) and his too-curious-for-her-own-good hospital nurse girlfriend Jess (Alisa Leigh). Nathan is in absolute despair over his mother Deborahs (Jane Karakula) obsession with trying to understand her kids through these online challenges, including the recent Sweet Relief thing, and her insistence on making friends with the next door neighbor Mr. McDaniel (Paul Lazar). McDaniel was once a semi-respected high school science teacher but has since devolved into crackpot theories, some that involve social media and those odd online challenges, and that just sets Nathan’s teeth on edge.
How on earth are all these odd characters connected, you may ask? Moxie has already mentioned some spider threads connections, but here’s a major one that will effectively explain most of the rest – Gerald knows McDaniel. Between the would-be child molester and the social engineering nutjob scientist, the terrorizing of the folk in this small town is pretty covered.
The film was shot over six days on a very small budget, full of minor practical effects for the murders, and many of the horror-ific scenes are accompanied by swelling happy muzak that seems to be completely out of place for the atrocities they accompany. Moxie can only surmise that that was somehow intentional, a counterpoint to underline that this sort of thing could be happening anywhere in small-town USA, under our very noses. Like how Gacy, and other serial killers, got away with such things for so long.
Sweet Relief will be available on premium VOD on Eventive, with a wider VOD release later on in 2025.