The Violent Heart

A nine-year-old boy secretly follows his older sister one night and watches her get shot dead. Nobody ever found out who did it. That's how 'The Violent Heart' begins, the feature Kerem Sanga made after 'First Girl I Loved', a romantic drama on a thriller's frame that its distributor sold as a 'Romeo and Juliet' in the American heartland.

Fifteen years on, Daniel is 24, works as a mechanic at a garage and carries a very short fuse and a criminal record that get in the way of the one thing he wants, to enlist in the Marines. He lives with his mother and a younger brother who goes to the same high school as Cassie.

Cassie turns up one day to drop off her father's car. She's 18, about to finish high school with a college place already secured, and she talks enough for both of them. She adores her father, who teaches English at her own school, until the afternoon she walks in on him with another woman. She starts skipping class and spending her time with Daniel, and what grows between them goes down badly in both homes. His past doesn't take long to catch up with them either.

Jovan Adepo, seen in the series 'Watchmen', is Daniel, and Grace Van Patten is Cassie. Lukas Haas and Kimberly Williams-Paisley play her parents, Mary J. Blige his mother and Jahi Di’Allo Winston his brother. The producers include Shawn Levy and Tobey Maguire, and shooting began in February 2019.

It was due to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2020, which was called off because of the pandemic, so its first screening came that September in competition at the Deauville American Film Festival. Gravitas Ventures released it in the United States on 19 February 2021, in a handful of cinemas and on digital rental at the same time. Critics were split: there was near-unanimous praise for the two leads and plenty of doubts about a final twist that more than one found hard to believe.

• Drama
• Thriller
• Romance