Fantasia Festival 2025: ‘Sweetness’ examines toxic parasocial relationships

Horror has long been fascinated by pop music, particularly in terms of celebrity and fan interaction. Over the past year, two of the genre’s biggest releases—Smile 2 and Trap—have delved further into the dark underbelly of fame and parasocial relationships. For her first feature film, Emma Higgins delves even deeper into fan psychology and the strange, obsessive behavior that connects musicians with their listener base. Playing this year’s Fantasia Fest, Sweetness, akin to this year’s indie found footage film Livestream, takes things to the next psychotic level with a fang-toothed script and one of the year’s most unnerving performances.

Kate Hallet plays Rylee, a bonafide stan of the band Floorplan, particularly lead singer Payton (Herman Tømmeraas). She covers her walls with his photos and compulsively listens to the group’s music. Their work serves as a necessary salve for Rylee, who struggles in the aftermath of her mother’s death. She frequently gets bullied in school, too, and her father, Ron (Justin Chatwin), being a cop does her no favors. Floorplan’s songs, especially the prickly, sensitive singer-songwriter ballads, have saved her life. She would die without them. As such, Rylee has forged an unhealthy parasocial relationship with Payton to the degree where she’d literally do anything to help him.

After the band’s arena show in town, Payton, high on drugs, hits Rylee with his car, leading to a weekend of delusion-fueled chaos. Rylee has the best of intentions, but her unwavering love and adoration for Payton clouds her judgment. She believes she can “fix him,” even if that takes her down a slippery, dangerous road she may not come back from. Each decision she makes to get him clean is as monstrously messy as the last. Her inability to stop herself results in rash choices that drive her further and further into her own self-dug ditch.

Higgins, who also wrote the script, takes cues from online fan behavior. Fans’ defensive retorts to slights against their faves and the distorted belief that only these A-list celebrities know and understand them inform much of Rylee’s character. But she remains a candy-coated, completely empathetic character. She’s just a teenager looking for validation and compassion. Her homelife is less than desirable, as her father takes a girlfriend, and she can only cope through inventing an entire relationship that simply doesn’t exist. We see this time and again on social media as the lines between fandom and celebrity blur, and there’s little understanding of boundaries, innate humanity, and how to properly connect to others.

Hallet delivers a strong lead performance as the well-intentioned and naive Rylee. As things spiral out of control, she never once realizes she’s in the wrong. The decisions she makes are best perceived through the lens of human desperation. The complex nature of fandom and our connection to art glues Sweetness together, and the audience’s complicated response to the material makes for an engaging experience. It’s not that we haven’t seen a similar conceit before in film, but it’s the way Emma Higgins expertly crafts her story so perfectly for a modern audience. The script is smart, incredibly layered, and dares the viewer to both empathize with and be disgusted by Rylee’s actions. As far as incisive dissections of celebrity and fandom are concerned, this is a real doozy.