People will tell you that The Heart Machine is some kind of romantic drama, or maybe a psychological thriller.
Look: just because nobody gets gored or mutilated doesn’t mean that this isn’t a horror movie.
It doesn’t need a ghost or a demon to make it one, either; merely the realization about how ALL of this is completely plausible.
The story, as ever, is basic: Cody (John Gallagher Jr.) and Virginia (Kate Lyn Sheil) are a loving couple in a long distance relationship. He lives in Bushwick, she’s doing a six month stint in a writing program in Germany.
Or so she says.
Events lead Cody to suspect she’s lying about her location, and spends the rest of the movie working himself into a frenzy trying to prove it.
First, the obvious: When you make the protagonist of your story a guy named Cody who lives in Bushwick, you’re setting yourself for a high degree of difficulty in making him come off sympathetic.
This is a hurdle writer-director Zachary Wigon does not clear.
On the other hand, it kind of seems like that might be the point.
There’s a version of this story wherein the sociopathic she-devil is playing psychologically crippling mind games on an innocent and unsuspecting man, and it’s to Wigon’s credit that he goes in another, altogether more honest direction.
Because the reality shown here is the true horror of the internet: how easy it would be to become exactly like Cody.
The internet facilitates this. Hell, it encourages it. Social networking makes it incredibly easy to connect with people, but that comes with the caveat that now it’s more or less legitimized stalking as a casual hobby.
We’ve all done it: spent some time rooting around your exes’ photo albums, checked to see if our high school enemy got fat, spent a little time investigating the contacts of that hottie we’re into… It’s all a button click away, and no one will ever know, and so we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that it’s not quite as intrusive and troubling as it actually is.
In another time, Cody would have to confront Virginia directly with his suspicions; but in the here and now, Facebook and Twitter make it so much easier for him to avoid the conversation he needs to have. Now he’s enabled to live inside a conspiracy that may or may not even exist.
It’s interesting how the movie plays with this. We see Virginia out and about in New York, at her job, hanging out with her friends, and making some life choices, both good and bad.
The narrative is unstuck in time, edited in an elliptical manner where we’re never entirely sure where we are in the Virginia side of the story. Are we in her past? Her present? Her future? Are some of these scenes the fevered imaginings of a confused boyfriend?
Whereas there is a relentless momentum to Cody’s quest. From the start, there are almost zero scenes where Cody isn’t obsessively investigating his girlfriend, or passive aggressively trying to catch her in a lie (and it’s pretty heavily implied that when we first meet the couple isn’t exactly the start of Cody’s paranoia).
And there’s genuine tension when he intrudes into the lives of strangers in an attempt to get to the truth. Not of the dangerous, life-threatening variety (again: not that kind of story), but one derived from the same basic impulse as cringe comedy. Will he get out of the mess he’s making without embarrassing himself or humiliating his unwitting victims? Tune in to find out!
Seeing as how this movie is essentially a two-hander (with other generally nonessential persons passing in and out of the frame), how much this works relies almost entirely on our loving couple.
Gallagher, perhaps best known for putting a boyish face on the sins of Aaron Sorkin for The Newsroom, somehow manages to make his obsessive, stalker-y character not entirely unsympathetic, and really quite appealing in his more romantic moments. Despite spending pretty much the whole movie talking to a computer screen, he manages to sell the couples’ intimate, lived in connection.
Which, granted, is probably a lot easier to do if the person on the other side of the screen is one of the finest young actors currently working.
More than anything, it’s just nice to see Kate Lyn Sheil playing a relatively normal, non screwed up person.
Okay, yeah; she’s screwed up here, too, but in a normal, everyday way, not a ‘Here comes Alan, quick hide the horses’ sort of way.
Virginia is a beautiful enigma (which, of course, is the only way this film can even work in the first place), and Sheil finds the space in the margins needed to turn her into a actual human being. When the truth of her situation is revealed, there’s a horrible and mundane logic to it that’s utterly devastating, thanks in no small part to the restraint Sheil uses in pushing it forward.
This is not a twisty, turny movie; it’s a human sized story in the best possible sense — which doesn’t necessarily make it the easiest sit. As good as he is at directing actors, as a visual stylist Wigon defaults to the handheld camera, low lighting, don’t-try-too-hard, prototypical indie look that’s all the rage these days, lending his film a borrowed sense of verisimilitude, but not doing it any favors otherwise.
The nonpartisan nature of the movie (it chooses to judge neither Cody or Virginia for their transgressions, only to observe) might be a turn off as well, but in the end this is a sweet, unnerving, sometimes very funny, sometimes deeply sad, all-too-real look at modern relationships.
For anyone who refuses to unfollow their ex, this movie is a must-see.
(WRITER’S NOTE: I’m assuming that every other review of this movie will mention the movie/TV series Catfish. I just wanted to point out that I purposely didn’t, and that you should all be very impressed by that.)