Directed by:
Sarah Adina SmithScreenplay:
Sarah Adina SmithCinematography:
Shaheen SethComposer:
Ellen ReidCast:
Rami Malek, DJ Qualls, Kate Lyn Sheil, Lin Shaye, Toby Huss, Nicholas Pryor, Ross Partridge, Lance Barber, Jennifer Lafleur, Mark Kelly, Sandra Ellis Lafferty (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
Buster (Rami Malek) was once Jonah, a hard-working husband and father whose job as the night-shift concierge at a hotel took its toll on his mood and, consequently, his marriage to the sensitive and long-suffering Marty (Kate Lyn Sheil) - until a chance encounter with a conspiracy-obsessed drifter (DJ Qualls) changed the course of their lives forever. As the sad and solitary present-day Buster drifts from house to house and eludes the local sheriff at every turn, we gradually piece together the events that fractured his life and left him alone on top of a snowy mountain, or perhaps in a small rowboat in the middle of a vast ocean - or both. (Toronto International Film Festival)
(more)Videos (3)
Reviews (2)
I guess the film is too weird for me, especially in its overall slow pace, the plot jumps, and mainly the acting, which isn't bad but just didn't click with me here. It's sci-fi, it's a drama, and it's a thriller, but in no case did I truly enjoy the film and feel captivated by how it ended.
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Buster’s Mal Heart is nonsensical blend of all kinds of things that don’t really go well together. The individual fragments of the narrative and the characters’ feelings and motivations are understandable, but the screenwriter/director/editor tries to weave them together into a sophisticated, deliberately confusing jigsaw puzzle straddling the line between reality and fantasy, which is supposed to make sense in the end and come to an almost philosophical conclusion. But in the course of the storytelling, the viewer’s interest and trust transform rather into wonderment and increasing distance. The characters’ behavior is exaggerated, turning them into cartoonish idiots, and in the (otherwise viewer-satisfying) social motifs of the story, the film fatally loses its way, as if it has forgotten what it originally wanted to say.
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