The FilmBuff have grabbed the rights to The Heart Machine – the thriller that preemed in SXSW’s eight film Narrative Feature Comp this past March. Produced by Lucas Joaquin (featured here) and Alex Scharfman and executive-produced by Parts & Labor’s Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jordan Lewis, Abe Schwartz, Andrew Kelley, and Eric Schultz, Zachary Wigon’s directorial debut will hit theatrically and via VOD on October 24th.
Gist: Cody (John Gallagher Jr.) and Virginia (Kate Lyn Sheil) start talking while he’s in Brooklyn and she’s in Berlin. It’s a romance that could only happen online, and they’re happy together—except they’ve never really met. But Cody’s questions about Virginia’s life in Berlin become an obsession, leading him to doubt that she’s there at all. Combing NYC for clues about her whereabouts, an increasingly driven Cody begins overstepping boundaries of privacy in his desperate quest for answers.
Worth Noting: Prior to his feature film debut, the Tisch film graduate’s steady film diet includes film criticism and filmmaking; his trio of shorts include Someone Else’s Heart (which was the winner of the Hammer to Nail short film contest) take the detour here.
Do We Care?: Having gotten some good buzz out of SXSW, this might not only make a convincing argument about the perils of our own voyeuristic tendencies, but specifically remind us that even today, that the advent of the internet has warped sped everything detailed in Orwell’s 1984. We swipe to the left on this indie hookup nightmare item.
