The Bittersweet Beauty of “Sweet Thing” (Film Review)

Indie filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell debuted his new feature Sweet Thing at the Berlin Film Festival this week.

Rockwell’s kids Lana and Nico did stellar jobs are portraying the film’s two main characters Billy (Lana) and Nico (Nico) two siblings trying to cope with their split family—their struggling alcoholic father Adam (Will Patton, Remember the Titans and Falling Skies), and their absent, neglectful mother Eve (Karyn Parsons, best known as “Hilary” from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, who is also Rockwell’s wife and mother of Lana and Nico). After a troubling experience with their mother’s new boyfriend, Billy and Nico run away with “outlaw” orphan Malik (Jabari Watkins). Though running away takes them on a poetic adventure, tragedy brings them back home.

Sweet Thing is shot in a slightly grainy greyscale. I’m not a huge fan of modern films shot black-and-white; that auteur aesthetic can sometimes feel a bit contrived. But as the film unfolded, Sweet Things’ grayness became more and more appropriate, juxtaposing well with its plot, tone, and subtext of nostalgia.

The family’s life was grey—the rugged wallpaper in their cluttered home, spaghetti with hotdogs for dinner, thrift store shopping, the kids skipping school to collect cans for money, wrapping Christmas presents in aluminum foil; the father…