Heart (1999)

HEART OF THE MATTER

An original movie that has some brilliant moments, but ultimately is a little unsatisfying because it's hard to really like any of the characters. The movie opens with a woman boarding a train; she is covered in blood and carries a sack that is also dripping blood. She ends up in a cemetery where she is digging up a grave but is apprehended by the police and we see her in jail, telling us the story in flashbacks. We meet a t.v. producer and her extremely jealous husband; he has every right to be--she is having a torrid affair with a new screenwriter. We then witness a terrible accident in which a cocaine-snorting woman slams her vehicle into a seventeen year old cyclist. We find out that this cyclist is the son of the woman we met in the beginning. Meanwhile, jealous hubby has had a debilitating heart attack and needs a new heart. The cyclist is pronounced brain dead, and being an organ donor, the doctors request permission to use the young man's heart for the jealous husband's transplant. From thereon, we are treated to a disturbing "Fatal Attraction" type of scenario in which the mother becomes obsessed with her son's recipient, and a tense web of deceit, ultimately leading to tragedy, plays out.
Christopher Eccleston is very good as the husband; Saskia Reeves is riveting as the disturbed mother; Kate Hardie is callously cool as the wife (her murdering of her husband's cat is an indicator of this woman's psyche); and Rhys Ifans as the hopelessly horny lover does well, too. The quality of the DVD's sound hurts the film immensely; the dialogue is always either ahead of or behind the physical movements of the actor's lips. The ending is quite graphic and disturbing.
HEART is unique and its impact stays with you; the main problem is the inability to truly understand or like the participants. March 15, 2005

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