By John Corrado

In the opening moments of director Kim Albright’s film With Love and a Major Organ (which recently won the award for Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Fest), Anabel (Anna Maguire) watches as a man stands on a cliff, rips his own heart out of his chest, and throws the glowing object into the water.

Albright’s film, adapted from screenwriter Julia Lederer’s stage play, imagines a world where hearts are made out of inanimate objects, which people can pull from their chests and discard. Now that everyone has their lives managed for them by their phones through the app LifeZap, which even tells users how to feel, real emotions are a thing of the past.

Anabel, who works in “virtual insurance” offering payouts to people whose clouds disappear, is one of the few holdouts to downloading the app. She is a visual artist who still prefers IRL feelings to digital micro-management of her emotions. Instead of just having the app choose someone for her like everyone else, Anabel seeks out a real life romantic connection.

Enter George (Hamza Haq), the man that she sees sitting on the bench across from her every day, dutifully reading yesterday’s newspapers (that way he knows if everything already worked out, he tells her). George is a lonely man who lives on a routine, his life still dominated by his overbearing mother (Veena Sood). Anabel records a cassette tape and leaves it for him, plotting a retro, analogue romance in the middle of this dystopian future. But it’s her heart that she really wants to give to him.

In adapting Lederer’s dryly humorous play for the screen, Albright adopts a purposely cold visual aesthetic for her film, crafting a world of liminal spaces and drab, grey interiors. Maguire grounds the film with her balanced portrayal of Anabel, who is at first friendly and effervescent, before a necessary change in her character partway through that she handles quite well. It’s in the film’s second half that Haq’s performance really takes centre stage, allowing him to show more range through a shift in his character, which the actor playfully realizes in a way that is delightful to watch.

For all of its high concept ideas about removable organs and human connection, the film’s reach does occasionally exceed its grasp. Even at 91 minutes, the story can run out of steam in some places, and ultimately settles on a nice if slightly basic message about how we all need our hearts. The supporting characters are mostly one-note (perhaps intentionally), and certain scenes have a sketch-like feel to them, with some overly quirky touches (such as overplayed interludes of George’s mother throwing plates against the wall).

But With Love and a Major Organ still has enough clever ideas and interesting world-building to make it a promising and unique feature debut for Albright. It’s an ambitious, mostly enjoyable blend of sci-fi themes and indie romantic dramedy, carried through on the strength of the performances by Maguire and Haq.

Film Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)

With Love and a Major Organ opens exclusively in theatres in limited release on April 12th. It’s being distributed in Canada by Filmoption International.