Synopsis
Where do you find love?
A man begins to suspect that his long-distance girlfriend, whom he met online but has never met in person, has been living in the same city the whole time and sets out to find her.
2014 Directed by Zachary Wigon
A man begins to suspect that his long-distance girlfriend, whom he met online but has never met in person, has been living in the same city the whole time and sets out to find her.
Fairly tender, well-observed look at the emotional collision point of our online and physical selves. Has a few indie romance break-up movie-isms I could've done without (what is that 2 minute poem epilogue over images of the city?) but all the stuff with Gallagher jr. going psycho online stalker/detective mode is a bit darker than I expected of something like this; at a certain point it becomes less about the crumbling of a dishonest relationship and more about the extreme forms that dishonesty takes with modern tools.
Going into this film and knowing only the basic premise, I was a bit wary. Why might a woman lie about her location to a man she went out of her way to meet online? About halfway through the film, I came up with my own reason: protection. While there have been success stories of couples who met online (I personally know at least 3), there have also been horror stories. Maybe it isn't unreasonable for a woman to be guarded. After all, you never know who a stranger online really is. So, if you can accept this idea, you can enjoy this film. Watching the mystery unravel while also watching the romance progress makes for a compelling watch. I also enjoyed seeing some parts of New York City that I've never seen before. Overall, a good film.
dude if john gallagher jr. was in love with you and would do anything 4 u why tHE FUCK WOULDNT YOU TELL HIM YOU ALSO LIVED IN NYC ?? SMH SMH SMH
can we talk about the power of a voice?
An ending poem, what could come off as schmaltzy, unearned self pleasure, here works to tie it together. Kate Lyn Sheil delivers as the camera runs past train tracks and skyscrapers, the same New York in monologues like News From Home, now even more towering, even more cavernous. It is the loneliness where even two people within it can feel so far, as far away as continents, that the distinction no longer matters within the city. The distance that is Berlin within the mind might as well be, we pass by those from farther and farther places every day, that at once the city is everything, and nothing. Sheil sounds almost…
60/100
Never thought much of Wigon as a film critic, but his directorial debut shows that he's been learning from the right movies, even as he manages to avoid emulating any particular director (that I noticed, anyway). I guess maybe there's a vintage Egoyanesque quality to such details as Cody obsessively scouring the background of Virginia's apartment (seen fuzzily via Skype) for clues as to her location—the indistinct wall outlet circled and compared to a standard German outlet, early on, was pretty much my ticket to the end credits, though I was watching this in Sample Mode—but the pretense of normality from both parties adds an additional, vaguely disturbing layer. Nice work, too, with the chronological ambiguity in Virginia's solo…
A proper oddity and a rather moving one at that. Lonely people connecting but a moment of madness from one snowballing far beyond the point of no return.
The always fantastic John Gallagher Jr gives off a suitably nervous energy as his often deathly awkward amateur sleuthing to discover the truth about his girlfriend takes him further and further towards what he knows will break him. Star of many an intriguing indie Kate Lyn Sheil is her usual mysterious self too, floating around as she does in her softly spoken way.
Definitely a hidden gem.
THM has an agreeable ambivalence about the Internet, indulging in Catfish suspicion and its flip-side, the enabled jealousy and privacy invasion of sheltered people. But it also sees some of the dangerous, duplicitous games people play online as an arduous process of seeking out new methods of romantic introduction, capable, if not easily so, of making people discover each other emotionally instead of letting physical interaction set the tenor of a relationship. Of course, absence can make the heart grow neurotic, and if the movie gains much of its humanity from Kate Lyn Sheil's multivalent performance*, it also retains its bite from how thoroughly Gallagher commits to a frightfully plausible kind of social media sleuth.
*Seriously, Sheil is always great, but especially so here. So many might have played up the femme fatale side of her character, but she manages to be vulnerable while also not apologizing for wanting to protect herself from physical and emotional harm
Once again we have ourselves a film tackling the subject matter of human connections and relationships along with technology’s role – both beneficial and detrimental – in the matter. These films portray millennials reliant upon a smattering of websites and smartphone apps that give them the ability to instantly connect with one another physically and/or pseudo-socially, yet ultimately failing when connecting face-to-face emotionally. The difference with Zachary Wigon’s debut, compared to the others, is that his film, The Heart Machine, is an intimate exploration bereft of judgement or ridicule.
Cody (John Gallagher Jr.) finds himself in quite the conundrum early on in The Heart Machine as he is beginning to suspect that his long-distance girlfriend, Virginia (Kate Lyn Sheil), may…