Buster’s Mal Heart
Description
Jonah is a frustrated hotel concierge, sitting alone at a large front desk during the night shift. Buster is a grizzled mountain wanderer, breaking into unoccupied vacation homes for food and lodging and spewing out curse-laden rants about Y2K conspiracy theories on talk-radio shows. Jonah and Buster happen to be the same man, but the mystery behind his radical transformation is the basis for Sarah Adina Smith’s surreal and vividly cinematic tale. Emmy award-winner Rami Malek (Mr. Robot) stars as Jonah/Buster, a young man with a troubled, impoverished past who bristles at the idea of conforming to the capitalist-driven fate created by “The Man.” As the pressures of his sleep-depriving job mount, and the paranoiac tirades from a nameless drifter (DJ Qualls) about the coming of a “second inversion” (a type of global wormhole) influence his thinking, Jonah’s relationships with his wife Marty (Kate Lyn Sheil) and daughter (Sukha Belle Potter) begin to fray. The film memorably challenges one’s perception of fantasy versus reality, shepherded by Malek’s multi-dimensional and moving performance. Smith’s confident handling of the story’s ambiguity through her suggestive script and DP Shaheen Seth’s sharp, patient cinematography render Buster’s Mal Heart a unique and twisted journey, as ambiguous as its opening image. —Chad Liffmann
Sarah Adina Smith has just two feature film director credits to her name, The Midnight Swim (2014) and now Buster’s Mal Heart, yet they show an exciting future for creative visual storytelling. Serving as writer and editor on both productions, her stories (including previous short films) tend to focus on individuals psychologically battling with themselves. In a TIFF interview with Filmmaker magazine, Smith states that she tends “to be interested in making movies where the insane turn out to be right about the nature of the world.”
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/207678549?autoplay=1Film Details
Language English
Year 2016
Runtime 98
Country USA
Director Sarah Adina Smith
Producer Jonako Donley, Travis Stevens
Writer Sarah Adina Smith
Editor Sarah Adina Smith
Cinematographer Shaheen Seth
Music Mister Squinter
Cast Rami Malek, DJ Qualls, Kate Lyn Sheil