A Cable-Era Concept Without the Spark

Read Time:5 Minute, 40 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Bitter Desire
–

Genre: Crime, Mystery, Thriller
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 10m
Director(s): Simon Oliver
Writer(s): Thomas Bodine
Cast: Nathan Hill, Shar Dee, Diana Benjamin
Where to Watch: available now, stream here: www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: BITTER DESIRE offers up the kind of premise that could easily fuel a tight, grounded thriller: a wounded police officer, a nurse who isn’t who she claims to be, and a home that becomes a battleground for misplaced trust. Conceptually, it’s a setup built for tension. The problem is that the final film never finds a way to make that tension feel convincing. What emerges instead is a well-intentioned project that struggles to rise above its limitations, even though you can see the filmmakers cared deeply about getting it made.

The defining quality of BITTER DESIRE is sincerity. That may not sound flashy, but in independent filmmaking, it matters. You can tell the people involved believed in this story, wanted to make something nostalgic, and were committed to seeing it through. The film carries that energy from start to finish. Unfortunately, sincerity alone can’t make up for the gaps in craft, pacing, and performance — and that’s where the movie hits its biggest hurdles.

From the beginning, the film feels like something you might stumble across while channel-surfing late at night in the mid-'90s. That’s not inherently a criticism. Plenty of filmmakers intentionally lean into the throwback aesthetic: soft lighting, melodramatic framing, and a lo-fi, cable-era style. If that was the goal here, the film unquestionably achieves it. BITTER DESIRE looks and feels like a time capsule. But to function as homage, the style has to be anchored by narrative confidence — and that’s where the film loses its footing.

The acting is the most noticeable weak point. Performances land in a place where the emotion feels recited rather than lived in. Characters speak in tones that don’t match their moment, and the delivery often lacks the urgency or vulnerability that the story depends on. You want to feel the danger in the room, the unease between caretaker and patient, the slow unraveling of trust. Instead, interactions play out with unease, as if the characters are reading through a rehearsal rather than reacting. It makes moments that should carry tension feel distant.

The storytelling has flashes of intention — a few scenes attempt to create atmosphere through lighting, color, or framing — but the cohesion isn’t there. Some shots capture the dreamlike, feverish tone the film seems to be reaching for, while others feel like placeholders waiting for a stronger choice. The result is a film that doesn’t quite know whether it wants to lean into surrealism, late-night melodrama, or a grounded thriller, and by attempting all three, it never settles into an identity.

What ultimately keeps the film from collapsing entirely is the passion you see between the lines. There’s genuine heart behind this project. Even when the execution falters, the intention is evident. Nathan Hill — whether acting, producing, or shaping creative direction behind the scenes — clearly has a personal connection to this style of filmmaking. That commitment is admirable because passion projects can often serve as stepping stones for artists as they figure out their strengths, explore tone, or try something outside their comfort zone.

But passion doesn’t erase the objective truth: BITTER DESIRE feels unfinished. Scenes lack grounding, the pacing often drifts, and the narrative never reaches the suspense promised by the premise. The story intensity exists, but rarely connects in a way that makes the thriller mechanics function. In a more polished version of this film, the house would feel claustrophobic, the nurse’s motives would unravel with precision, and the protagonist’s vulnerability would be something the audience actually feels rather than simply understands.

There’s also a specific tonal quality running through BITTER DESIRE that feels pulled straight from early-90s local cable access programming — the kind of late-night thriller that relied more on atmosphere. That aesthetic can absolutely work today when it’s intentionally stylized, but here it plays as nostalgia rather than an artistic choice. The lighting, staging, and dialogue delivery echo an older era without the modern tools that could’ve sharpened the throwback into something intentionally retro. Instead of feeling like a contemporary film inspired by that period, it feels stranded in it, as if the production never fully embraced what updated editing, pacing, or refinement could have added. With a clearer commitment to blending past and present, this approach could have become one of the film’s strengths.

There’s nothing mean-spirited about this project. It’s not a cynical cash-grab or a disinterested attempt at genre filmmaking. It just falls into the category of films with big ambition and limited resources, where the pieces never come together. For some viewers, that affection for old-school cable thrillers may soften the blow.

BITTER DESIRE is passion-driven — not without effort, but far from its potential. You can appreciate what they tried to do while still recognizing what didn’t work. And sometimes, that’s the fairest way to approach a film like this: acknowledge the heart behind it, but be honest about the experience as a whole. This one struggles, and even though the intent shines through in places, the final product feels more like a draft of something than the finished version it wants to be.

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[photo courtesy of NHPRODUCTIONS, SECTOR 5 FILMS]

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