Cautionary tales often hail from unlikely places. From dark corners, narrow streets, and in the case of Dave Shecter’s Candy Heart Heist, the booth of a small diner. A chance meeting between a young delinquent and a mysterious stranger that changes both lives in unpredictable ways. It all sounds like an intriguing premise, and that intrigue is most certainly justified—when the filmmakers finally choose to address it, that is.
Candy Heart Heist begins by showing the suburban home of Amber (Scarlett Vaill), a teenager with a clear attitude problem towards authority. She’s on her way to the convenience store where she takes advantage of a small dustup between the owner John (Jason Whited), and drunk prostitute Jany (Amy DiLorenzo), to pocket a heart-shaped box of candy. The vendor takes notice, seeing Amber take off into the streets, with local officers Birch (Giovanny Vasquez) and Rounds (John Steel Macdonald) eventually alerted to the theft. Fleeing the scene, Amber ends up seeking shelter at a diner, climbing into the booth of an elderly gentleman named Bradley (Dave Shecter).
There are quite a few moving parts to Dave Shecter’s script, especially early on as we are introduced to various members of the area, from the aforementioned Jany, the store owner, Amber’s parents, the cops, a detective (Carl Covington), and even a street vendor (Kino McFarland). It’s often characteristic of these small-town dramas to field a larger cast of oddballs and do-gooders, and while the film certainly gets by with its whimsical small-town ensemble, that charming vibe is unfortunately all it seems to rely on.
Twenty-five minutes might seem long for a short, especially in a modern climate where it’s encouraged to keep such projects as brief as possible; but even with that in mind, Candy Heart Heist feels too rushed and unfocused in its opening stanza—needing perhaps double its original runtime to properly establish everyone without them feeling like afterthoughts. Then again, there are other issues that need to be addressed.
For starters, the stakes are simply too minimal. Amber is clearly not from the most financially comfortable household, but her surroundings certainly don’t imply the need for her to steal something as low-end as a box of candy. The storeowner makes no fuss about it, as he’s keen on closing up shop (in the midday hours), and the cops are about as inept as screenwriting will allow them to be. Then, of course, we get to the crux of the story nearly 10 whole minutes in, where Amber ends up opposite the mysterious Bradley in a diner, where she proceeds to hide herself in a booth that is completely visible to anyone looking in. Filmmaking often asks you to suspend disbelief, but Candy Heart Heist asks just a touch too frequently—the plot trudges along without most of its characters having any impact on it whatsoever.
Contrasting all that is the actual dialogue between Bradley and Amber that is suitably tense and shows two differing worlds colliding in the unlikeliest of places. If the short were to supplant this element of its narrative and work exclusively with it, perhaps we’d be having a very different conversation about it. Vaill and Shecter are excellent, elevating the material they are given to terrific effect while also touching on some mature themes—a welcome changeup from the cartoonish tone that preceded their encounter. Sure, it ends about as predictably as you can imagine, but for as long as the conversation lasts, it’s a darn good one.
Candy Heart Heist might be all over the place narrative-wise, but if you strip away everything but the central performances from Shecter and Vaill, you’re left with one sensational scene surrounded by otherwise meandering storytelling.
