thirtyfivestories Jonah works third shift at a hotel. He cleans the pool, retrieves rackets from the racquetball court, and polishes off the restaurant's dishes. He is a utility man. Jonah toils in the belly of working class employment. He has voluntarily allowed himself to be swallowed by capitalism. His days and nights have become shuffled. A wife and daughter fuel this purgatory. Marty, Jonah's wife, was the first soul to accept his junkie heart. At a church food pantry she served him then invited him into the kitchen for a kiss. Jonah's reformation began there. Marty's parents never approved, but their child, Roxy, gave the couple a hefty bargaining chip. Jonah becomes rehabilitated and pretends to fear God on Sundays. But he never needed a pew. He needed a cabin, or dreams of a cabin. A home to raise Roxy in, void of the putrid society that delivered him into the clutches of drugs, and imprisoned Marty in the legalistic jaws of religion. He crawls into another state of servitude in hopes of eventual freedom.The still, twilight hours perpetuate his daydreams. On one fateful evening, The Last Free Man walks in and preaches of the Inversion. An event that will usher in the collapse of all things restrictive. All digital identities erased. A clean slate. And few will survive, only those privy to the coming seduction. Jonah begins to reluctantly entertain the man, but quickly starts sipping his kool- aid. The seemingly endless road to his family's cabin leads Jonah into more impending delusions. Instead of being preached at, he chooses to become a prophet. He becomes Buster, a lock-picking mountain goat. He politely pillages vacation homes that he could only dream to build. He treats the vacant homeowners with respect, but finds ways to subtly rebuke.Buster and Jonah are the same man on two different paths. The former, a man who denies tragedy. The later, the man responsible for tragedy. Buster's Mal Heart is a film that makes you think twice about who you let in your life. Or maybe the film wants you to stand on trial for all your personal trespasses. Put your hand on the bible and proclaim, "I couldn't see the blood until the lights were on."

westsideschl Odds are that the majority of the five star reviewers didn't understand the movie, and the one star admitted to not getting it. No he didn't kill his wife and child. Did he even have a wife and child? No he was not stranded in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean - symbolic for? So open-ended, you choose. Did he meet a strange independent free-psychotic person - maybe, maybe not. Most likely not. Did he leave his job to spend his life ransacking cabins in the wilds - possibly, but possibly not. The chase encounter seemed too dreamy to be real and then his disappearance at the the end probably means he didn't exist. So, conclusion choose whatever you want - it's your story to make up.

Aaron Simpson There's been one point or another, during our lives, that we've found ourselves in conversation with someone who has both intrigued and concerned us with their eccentricity. For me, these moments are often experienced around public transport; the stranger that sits next to you despite the available seats on the bus, the slightly intoxicated person at the stop whilst you're waiting for the last bus, or the person hanging around the train station waiting room that doesn't appear to be waiting for any particular connection. For Jonah (Rami Malek), this interaction was with The Last Free Man (DJ Qualls), whom he meets at the hotel in which he is the concierge. Despite the company policy, and the sight of his drug addiction, Jonah agrees to provide a room for The Last Free Man where he preaches of a conspiracy known as the Inversion. From here begins the descent of Jonah's mind; he becomes slowly-and-then-suddenly fixated around the concept of wormhole's – Not dissimilar from those depicted in Donnie Darko (2001) – and becomes increasingly dissatisfied with his work as the night manager. Structuring the chronology of Buster's Mal Heart simplistically, however, reduces the complex portrayal of the disparate temporal episodes. During these sorts of crises in film, the viewer can often safely turn to visual symbolism and verbal leitmotif to engage with the deeper echelon of meaning in the narrative. For example, in The Godfather (1972) we can take the oranges as portent for impending death, and in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) we can take the spiral imagery to represent confusion and disorientation. The issue presented in Buster's Mal Heart is that the haven of symbolism does not seem to complement the narrative directly and opens up a new avenue of interpretation. Through the fog of suburban discontent and the forests of Montana is a cache of religious symbolism present to conflict and supplement the film. Early in the film, during Jonah's internal struggle with his ideals, it is learned that his wife is an ex-addict who was reformed through the church. She tells him that he is pleased that he has 'found faith in his heart' for them to be together. This appears to be of little consequence as many rehabilitated addicts utilise the structure and comfort of organised religion to conquer their issues. However, much later in the film during a newscast featuring 'Buster', his mother watching expresses the importance of the role of God in restoring him. These two episodes bookend the film, demonstrating the imposition of religion on Jonah, a man who spends a great portion of the film buying into the concept of the Inversion – something dismissed and ridiculed by the public as mere conspiracy. It is not so much the agency of clarification that these references to Christianity provide for unlocking the demanding rhetoric of the film, but the frequency of symbols is something that cannot be dismissed as coincidence. It seems likely that the aesthetic of Buster on the rowboat in the middle of the ocean, where he spends a figurative forty-days and forty-nights in a form of desert, is designed to draw comparisons with the Western imagination of Christ. It seems more than coincidental that this image is contrasted with one of Buster wearing a Santa costume whilst he squats in the holiday home, taking hostage the elderly couple that have returned.Perhaps the most curious of all the religious symbolism throughout the film are the allusions to the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Whilst not all of the plagues feature explicitly throughout the film, the subtlety and consistency of the religious imagery indicates that the plagues, or trials, present to test Jonah demand investigation. During Jonah's 'staycation' in the hotel, he experiences the first and tenth plagues. Buster returns to his room, to find the bath tub full of water. Moving into the bedroom, he discovers his wife and child are dead and are covered in blood. It could be argued that this represents the first plague: water into blood. It seems that The Last Free Man; the man with a cocaine addiction, a disbelief in forms of personal identification, and a penchant for drifting, was the murderer. However, his identity is proved to be questionable as the police and security review the CCTV footage and find no man present at all. This appears to suggest that The Last Free Man never truly existed and that the perpetrator of the infanticide was Jonah himself, thus bringing on the remaining plagues. Later in the film, the frame is filled with the sight of Buster, alone, drifting afloat a rowboat in the ocean begging for death. Whilst it is unclear whether this expression originates in existential ennui, honest grief, or remorseful guilt, it could simply be interpreted as an emotional darkness, a metaphor for the ninth plague: darkness. When Buster awakes the following morning, he finds the boat full of frogs: the second plague. Whilst any self-respecting survivalist would interpret this infestation as a source of sustenance for the future, it is not hard to suspect that these victuals would provide little restoration. The manifestation of the remaining plagues is implied rather than represented directly; whilst Buster is living in the cave amongst the Montana forest the plagues of lice, boils, thunderstorms of hail, locusts, and vicious animals are easily imaginable as aspects of wild living.The film does, however, engage with the tenets of Christianity and highlight tensions between organised belief and conspiracy theories to a degree that refusing to recognise them would be an incomplete approach to the film. The function of this imagery is elusive, it might serve to engineer Jonah's cognitive dissonance and existential collapse, or rather, it might be something of a muse for director Sarah Adina Smith, designed to represent the trials of one's mind when balancing personal belief and social expectation.Read more reviews at 'The Cineaste Review' - www.thecineastereview.wordpress.com

guedesnino Among the outstanding features of cinema produced in the late 1990s is the mark of a thriving period in psychologically epitomized films depicted by alter ego figures and "symbologies" or by using borderline, bipolarity, and personality disorders. Not that this was a novelty in film history, but films from that period such as "Fight Club", "Raising Cain", "The Sixth Sense", "The Others" just to name a few films that are still striking in a new direction Which require a specific alignment in all areas (script, lighting, direction, actors, sound, photography, etc.).Considering the degree of complexity of this style of films, where in the end the public is faced with a multiplicity of personal understandings and constructions, I believe, in the importance of the trajectory we follow, terms or we count on an instrumentation provided by the script, that helps in filling Gaps and even not having the pretension (which is already too pretentious), of not helping in this, giving greater freedom of interpretation or rational disagreement, in years aspects, it is necessary (to have) understanding. What is the point of doing something that does not allow dialogue, which does not want to be understood, even if its understanding is by denying it?In Buster's Mal Heart movie directed by Sarah Adina Smith, we come across a highly fragmented story, and that needs to be so, because, also fragmentary is also life, or rather the lives of the protagonist of this fable, Buster (Rami Malek) . So we have the approach of a man from the mountains, the hermit; Of a shipwrecked man with analogies to the biblical stories (especially Jonah and the Whale), and Buster, a young father who works at night as a hotel concierge, and in Buster's story, we will have connections to the others Lives and many others that arise during the film, including that of a nameless unknown (DJ Qualls), who appears to be a prophet of the cyber- era and who is so intimately connected to Buster.Buster's Mal Heart is a film that even seeking to break with the structure of three acts, with linear narrative, even being a mix or copied fragmented lives, does not compromise in anything the construction in search of an understanding by the public, In each fragment or blink of a life, instrumental sum with points that will collaborate in the points of turn, in the Plot twist of the film and the insertion of the life of Buster.The acting of Rami Malek as Buster is flawless. For fans of this promising award-winning actor in the TV series Mr. Robot, the film also serves as a strong appreciation for Rami's work, as both in the film and in the series we have the similarities of a displaced character from the real world, Personification of an alter-ego and with a thousand conspiracies in the head.