Cherie is a young single mother and pre-law student working as a secretary for a legal firm in Los Angeles. On her way home, her boss James calls her saying that she double-booked him for dinner with an important client at the same time as his anniversary dinner, which Cherie has no memory of. James asks Cherie to go to the dinner for him and she reluctantly accepts. While preparing for the dinner, Cherie's period starts and she realizes that she is out of tampons.
Cherie meets the client, Ethan, at his house and the two go to dinner. Cherie is charmed by Ethan, although he has a sudden outburst of anger when approached by a dog, explaining that he was bitten by one as a child. Ethan invites Cherie to spend the night with him, setting an alarm on his phone for the early morning so that she can return home before her daughter wakes up. When he does, Cherie notices that he already has an alarm for 5:25 AM. She agrees to stay for a drink. When they enter his house, Ethan attacks Cherie, causing her to flee.
Running down the street, Cherie tries to get help from nearby residents but is ignored. She finally finds two women outside a movie theater and convinces them to call 911. The police arrive and arrest Cherie for public intoxication, despite her protestations that she was attacked. Cherie talks to another woman in the cell who panics when Cherie describes Ethan. The woman warns Cherie that Ethan "controls men" and urges her to seek the "First Lady". The police escort Ethan into Cherie's cell, where he tells her that he will hunt her, and that if she survives until morning, he will let her go.
Upon being released, Cherie heads to James' apartment. He seems sympathetic, offering her clean clothes to wear. Cherie searches for information about Ethan on James' computer and finds that she is the latest in a long string of women marked as tithes for Ethan. James' wife, Judy, warns Cherie that Ethan can smell her blood and that she should clean herself thoroughly. Cherie flees on a bus and then calls her ex-boyfriend Trey for help.
While stopping at a gas station to buy tampons, Cherie is ambushed by Ethan. She strikes him in the head and escapes with the help of Trey, who drives her to his place, despite the fact that his new girlfriend Dawn, Cherie's former best friend, is there. Realizing that Cherie has been attacked, Dawn is unexpectedly sympathetic. When Ethan arrives looking for Cherie, Dawn and her friends arm themselves to fight him off, but he easily kills them. Ethan forces Cherie to leave with him. Trey, who had gone out, returns home and confronts Ethan, who decapitates him.
Cherie flees, and remembering Judy's advice, throws some of her menstrual blood onto a passing car to mislead Ethan. Cherie flees to a church where she asks the priest for holy water and a crucifix, hoping to ward off Ethan. She discovers the body of the priest and realizes that Ethan had assumed his form. Ethan then reveals his true form to Cherie. Returning to human form, Ethan is attacked by the priest, allowing Cherie to escape.
Cherie finds her way into an underground rave, where she sees a flyer for the First Lady and calls the number on it, getting the location for a nearby spa. When Cherie is accosted by a man, she is rescued by a group of party girls who take her with them. As they leave the rave, the girls offer to take Cherie surfing in the early morning, but Cherie realizes that Ethan's alarm was set for sunrise. Just then, Ethan attacks them until Cherie is saved when a pitbull shows up, barking at Ethan and causing him to disappear.
At the spa, Cherie discovers the "First Lady", Dinah, and a group of women practicing martial arts. Dinah explains that Ethan is a fallen angel whose job was to protect and guide humanity. Ethan had decided that men should rule and used his prodigious powers to assure masculine ascendance throughout history. Dinah says that she needs to use Cherie as bait to lure Ethan out so that he can be defeated.
The women clean Cherie up and she drives to the Santa Monica Pier. There, Cherie reopens her wounds, attracting Ethan. As Ethan prepares to kill Cherie, his alarm rings and he realizes that the dawn has arrived. Cherie throws a rock through a blacked-out window, exposing Ethan to the sunlight and incapacitating him. The women from the spa, who have gathered outside, throw more rocks through the windows, flooding the room with sunlight and mortally weakening Ethan.
Outside, Cherie mocks the now-weakened Ethan as his power dies. Dinah lights Ethan on fire, killing him. Cherie then returns home to her daughter.
In June 2018, it was announced Shana Feste would direct the film, from a screenplay she wrote alongside Keith Josef Adkins and Kellee Terrell. Jason Blum, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, and Feste will serve as producers on the film, under their Blumhouse Productions, Automatik and Quiet Girl Productions banners, respectively.[4] In February 2019, Ella Balinska, Pilou Asbaek, Clark Gregg, Dayo Okeniyi, Betsy Brandt and Shohreh Aghdashloo joined the cast of the film.[5] Feste based the film on her real-life experiences of being a victim of a traumatizing date and sexual assault.[6]
It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2020.[9] It was also scheduled to screen at South by Southwest on March 13, 2020, but the festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[10][11][12] It was scheduled to be released theatrically by Blumhouse Tilt and OTL Releasing on May 8, 2020,[13] but it was pulled from the schedule due to movie theater closures because of the pandemic restrictions.[14] In May 2020, Amazon Studios acquired distribution rights to the film, and released it digitally on Amazon Prime Video[15] on October 28, 2022.[16]
Critical reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 62% of 52 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "Run Sweetheart Run's heavy-handedness blunts the effectiveness of its message, but this remains a wily, unpredictable thriller."[17]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, gave the film a score of 51 out of 100 based on 14 critic reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[18]
