The Heart Machine Dir. Zachary Wigon

[Filmbuff; 2014]

Styles: stalker romance, thriller
Others: You’ve Got Mail, Catfish

The potential for (and problems with) love on the Internet is not new fodder for filmmakers. If you mark the beginning of the trend around You’ve Got Mail, it reaches a pinnacle with Catfish. And yet, we still seem troubled by the prospect. Or at least, that’s the idea behind The Heart Machine. The movie, about a couple who meet and develop a full-fledged relationship online, expresses anxieties about the disparity between the digital and physical realms. But beneath the surface of this self-consciously modern drama lurks an old-fashioned thriller driven by a timeless paranoia: how do you ever completely trust someone?

When we meet Cody (John Gallagher Jr.) and Virginia (Kate Lyn Sheil) they’re already in the throes of a serious relationship. But they’ve never met in person, having “met” on OkCupid. Their face time is limited to Skype because Cody lives in New York and Virginia, though also a New Yorker, claims to be on a temporary writer’s fellowship in Berlin.

From the outset, it’s apparent that Cody suspects Virginia is lying about being abroad. It’s also apparent that he’s probably right. It’s not a question of whether her lie will be exposed; it’s a matter of how and when.

The “how” turns out to be the structure supporting the film’s more abstract and intellectual aspirations. Rather than confronting Virginia, Cody begins to stalk her — if it’s possible to stalk someone without quite knowing where she is. What Cody’s pursuit demonstrates is not how easy it is to dissemble online, but rather the great extent to which our physical and digital existences now overlap. It’s the intermingling of these realities that allows Cody to track Virginia with relative ease.

He gathers clues during their video chats, both as evidence of her deception and to narrow down her location. A siren passing outside her window sends him searching online for the sound of German ambulances (their blare is nothing like what he heard). When Virginia mentions a former fling with an East Village barista, Cody uses shoe-leather sleuthing to hunt down the spot and the caffeine slinger. With the practiced movements of a Raymond Chandler hero, he surreptitiously snags the dude’s phone, looking for texts or other digital footprints that will reveal Virginia’s real whereabouts.

Of course, our lives online don’t perfectly mirror our lives in the world at large and Cody’s Internet detective work sometimes leads him astray. After seeing Virginia in a Facebook photo, he tracks down another girl in the picture — who, it turns out, doesn’t know Virginia at all. “We’re not even Facebook friends,” she says.

If Cody is a young man on the brink of psychological pathology, Virginia certainly doesn’t lack for problems of her own. Aside from lying to someone she claims to love, she also cheats on him repeatedly, engaging in shallow romantic escapades facilitated by one website or another.

It’s not easy to portray emotionally stunted characters without coming across as childish or vapid. Nor is it easy to convey onscreen chemistry when the most intimate scenes between Cody and Virginia take place across yet another screen. But both Gallagher Jr. and Sheil are up to the challenge. In both cases, the actors give depth and meaning to behavior that would otherwise seem irrational.

While online encounters provide fertile ground to examine modern intimacy, writer/director Zachary Wigon doesn’t convince us that Cody and Virginia’s digital preoccupations are the cause and not the symptom of their emotional shortcomings. Long before we were meeting people on the internet, romance and even friendship has been shaded by the very same fear at the heart of this movie: how do you know someone is telling you the truth about who they are?

That’s not to say that the scope of this question hasn’t changed as we’ve moved more of our lives online. But if the goal of The Heart Machine is to examine how this strains or even precludes meaningful relationships, that goal is overshadowed by Cody’s pursuit. The movie’s stalker plot is more fully realized and engaging.

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