The writer director originally made a 17 minute short on this with some of the same cast. Clearly someone paid him to bulk this up to a feature length work. Problem is it's the same 17 minute film dragged out to 85 minutes with nothing new to add. It's slow and dull and leans heavily on mumblecore and hipster clichés of random dialog and in medias res scenes that have no beginning or context. You're supposed to be bored and baffled I guess. At any rate the dialog is weak and stupid because it's supposed to be real. But who wants to overhear random snippets of other people's lives? It does not a movie make. Of the two main characters, one is an obsessive paranoid and the other's a sociopath. But again that's supposed to be uber cool in hipster Bushwick. BTW is Bushwick really 100% upper class white kids? Well anyway as others have noted the plot is very simple the characters are all extremely odd and the whole thing is totally pointless. Add to that a lot of shakycam and closeups of phone and laptop screens and you'll be left wondering why this didn't stay a 17 short.
Review of The Heart Machine
The Heart Machine
(2014)
A reworking of a 17 minute short by the same director-writer
27 February 2015