The Heart Machine

By allowing interaction at any time and any place, social media has allowed to art of flirting to rise to unheard of heights. The social media also lets us create and cultivate our image in ways previously not possible. Appropriate pictures, updates and a new “me” is ready. But what happens when real emotions appear between invented avatars? This is what Zachary Wigon considers in The Heart Machine. Cody and Virginia have never seen each other in person; he lives in New York and she in Berlin, but they understand each other without words. They have daily dates on Skype, and anxiously await each meeting, until Cody begins to suspect that his partner lives in the same town and is only feigning distance. The innocent investigation brings him into harm’s way and pushes him to the edge of sanity, but the truth will be his toughest emotional lesson. While the film is formally a romance with genre cinema, actors John Gallagher Jr. and Kate Lyn Sheil create equivocal and intriguing characters that carry this stylish, warm and unsettling story on their shoulders.