Daniel sees his sister sneak out the door and follows to a dark, secluded spot in the woods, where she is killed. The writer/director makes a point of contrasting the daunting odds facing the hero as he tries to gain admission to the Marines despite his juvenile criminal conviction, and the heroine failing to truly listen to Daniel's pain, even as she offers herself as a confidant and emotional cheerleader. On a motorcycle. 2023 METACRITIC, A FANDOM COMPANY. In other cases, its best just to accept the surprise and move on, salvaging what you can of the experience. Coming Soon, Regal white) suburban setting, and was so popular it was remade (by Sirk) and became a keyinspiration for Todd Haynes' 2005 Sirk tribute"Far from Heaven.". Your privacy is important to us. Is it necessary to the story? The first getting-to-know-you conversation between Cassie and Daniel is a disaster of bad writing, and yet its intended to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of establishing their immediate bond. Cassie is, Nine-year-old Daniel lives in a town outside of Nashville. Shes a white high school senior and hes a Black 24-year-old ex-con working as a mechanic at the only place in town that will hire him, but those arent the differences that ultimately threaten to tear them apart. A connector at heart, Claire is solution-focused and people-centric, believing that the best investment she can make is devoting her time, skills, and energy towards the fight to end sexual . He ends up witnessing her murder. The Violent Heart was a VOD / Digital release in 2021 on Friday, February 19, 2021. Cassie tells Daniel about her father; he expressed that she must really love her father because of how she speaks about him in such a high standard. Throughout, Van Patten has to wrestle with a certain weakness in Cassies characterization, but especially at the start. Sangas film is gripping for how it uses old scars to expose the pain of fresh wounds and vice-versa, and swirls complex weather systems of inherited and/or systemic violence into white squalls of new wrath. Marvel Movies Ranked Worst to Best by Tomatometer, Jurassic Park Movies Ranked By Tomatometer, Golden Tomato Awards: Best Movies & TV of 2022, 10 WTF Horror Movies to Watch if You Loved M3GAN. Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Largeof RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. Nearly 20 years after a CTA experiment with bus surveillance cameras failed miserably, Mayor Lori Lightfoot wants to try it again and then some in a designated downtown area. Easier still because Sanga doesnt play the reveals for shock value so much as inevitability, and his biggest bombshells are only as powerful as their aftershocks. All Rights Reserved. violent And for the people who have already watched that film, The Little Things, some could use the ending explained. But what The Violent Heart aspires to is at odds with what it is capable of achieving.There are some great performances here by Lukas . His lead: A bright and beaming high school senior named Cassie (Grace Van Patten), who seems to willfully reject the popularity that she ought to own like a birthright. 44,515, This story has been shared 35,289 times. I struggled mightily with this film. 7,823, This story has been shared 7,496 times. So her thoughts change; and she starts to interact with Daniel a little more. Imagine an early Bruce Springsteen ballad worked over in afiction writing workshop until the life has been bled out of it. Cassie is the nicest possible version of this character (earnest to a fault, as The Violent Heart struggles to liberate her from the basic function she has to play in this story), but Daniel has several good reasons to be reluctant about all this. Coming Soon. In The Violent Heart, writer-director Kerem Sanga (The Young Kieslowski) wants us to believe that were watching a sensitive post-racial romance about a goody-goody white Tennessee teen who challenges her familys unexamined biases by hooking up with the local bad boy who is Black and six years her senior when in fact, the movie pulls a fast one in the final act. This story has been shared 44,515 times. The Violent Heart is a 2020 American drama film written and directed by Kerem Sanga. It announces Van Patten and Adepo as talents to watch, and Sanga as a director of ability just so long as he resists the impulse to write. This movie keeps getting close to full self-awareness and raw honesty about its characters' predicaments(never more so than when Daniel marvels bitterly at Cassie's ability to see the silver lining in every cloud) only to shrug it off and keep moping in mutedwidescreen. They won't be able to see your review if you only submit your rating. And then Fate arrives to amp up the tension with relentless artificiality, shotgunning plausibility out the window into the road where its trampled by stampeding lemmings, then squashed by a fallen blimp. Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus, and Mayhem in the USA: Season 1, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 1, Link to Marvel Movies Ranked Worst to Best by Tomatometer, Link to Golden Tomato Awards: Best Movies & TV of 2022, Link to 10 WTF Horror Movies to Watch if You Loved. 7,496, This story has been shared 2,200 times. His relationship with their mom (an excellent Mary J. Blige, who features in all of the films most crucial scenes and textures every line with hard-won understanding) is particularly loaded. [3] In February 2019, Cress Williams joined the cast of the film. Melancholy, mature drama explores father-son themes. He sees Wendy embrace another person, then hears gunshots. The Violent Heart is a 2020 American drama film written and directed by Kerem Sanga. Sanga should have trusted this couple to steer the plot, instead of imprisoning them in it. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. Adepos implosive performance is arresting even when hes trying to find a way for Daniel to slip out of this entire situation, and Van Patten a singular talent whos been one role away from going supernova ever since Tramps finds hidden depths to Cassie that dont get a chance to surface on their own (it feels like the lovers talk more via text than they do in person). If you're interested to know more about me or this blog in general head to the 'about me' tab in the menu bar. A promising but self-thwarting film like this is more depressing than an outright bad or dumb one. Please reference Error Code 2121 when contacting customer service. 830, This story has been shared 825 times. Drama 2021 1 hr 42 min STARZ. He asks her to take the car for an oil change, and after further repairs necessitate keeping the vehicle overnight, she hits up Daniel for a ride back to school to meet her dad. When he was nine, he saw his older sister being murdered in the woods by a man whose face he never saw and who has gone unpunished for 15 long years. suggesting a diversity update. Terms and Policies It's unnecessary for Daniel to be 24; aging him at 21or 22 would still have been noticeable compared to Cassie but not borderline creepy. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Related Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba. Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners. Years later, Daniel (Jovan Adepo) is still dealing with the aftermath of this traumatic experience. Mary J. Blige brings the weight of painful life experience to her role as Daniels mother, and Lukas Haas at least has fun playing Cassies father, a role that makes so little sense you may still be laughing about it a day later. A boy named Daniel witnessed his older sister Wendy being shot in the woods when he was 9. Even though we can feel the racial tension as subtext in a few scenes (particularly when mom and dad raise objections, and mom starts to say something like, "Also, he's" but doesn't finish) it seems unrealistic that nobody in this story would bring it up as text. It feels like theyre going for a Shakespeare in Tennessee by way of Douglas Sirk vibe in the overwrought tragedy The Violent Heart, and while the intentions most certainly are noble, the end result is a convoluted mess with one Big Reveal we can see coming 45 minutes in advance and a second Even Bigger Reveal that comes across as arbitrary and borderline desperate. Writer-director Kerem Sanga has a knack for delivering arresting, noir-like visuals, especially from medium- and long-shot distance, and the talented cast gamely tries to sell the material, but The Violent Heart is so muddled there are times we have to remind ourselves of the connection between certain characters, and the histrionics so over the top were hoping everyone will just take a deep breath and CALM THE HECK DOWN. This Article is related to: Film, Reviews and tagged Grace Van Patten, Kerem Sanga, Reviews, The Violent Heart. Cassie is an 18-year-old who has had her fill of high school. Recipients of grants will receive up to $7,500. There are subtleties and complexities of emotion, expressed between the lines, that we dont expect. Should you stream or skip the drama-thriller #TheViolentHeart on VOD? Having to leave the car behind she asks Daniel to take her back to the high school that his brother's attend. Quiet and clenched and eager to follow his father into the Marines, he seems to be doing a pretty good job of it, but a jail stint on his record suggests that hasnt always been the case. And so Cassie dotes on her dad instead, until one afternoon, she walks in on him having an unscheduled after-class meeting with a woman who isnt her mom. The scenes between Daniel and his family are heartbreaking, because it's clear that their family is still grieving the loss of the oldest daughter/sister. Yet, a lot of what comes before is not bad at all. But by the end, you will in no way be able to regard The Violent Heart as anything resembling a serious movie. All rights reserved. As fort he meaning, I've got nothing to say. Its hard to tell. Their relationship escalates into romance while in Nashville, but it causes a stir back in their hometown. The result is a shoot-the-moon melodrama grounded in the cold reality that anger comes for us all in one form or another, and that love is just another word for the room we make for it in our lives. "The Violent Heart" is an American television play broadcast on February 6, 1958, as part of the second season of the CBS television series Playhouse 90. Just leave us a message here and we will work on getting you verified. And then he meets Cassie (Grace Van Patten), a high school student who must have been 3 at the time of the crime. (Unrated. By that late point, our emotional investment in these often thinly drawn characters has plummeted like GameStop stock. Against all odds, a redemptiveromance blooms betweenDaniel and Cassie (Grace Van Patten), an 18-year-old high school senior. 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