Critics reviews

The Heart Machine is not structured like a mystery: it's to Wigon's great credit that early on in the film he reveals the truth regarding Virginia's whereabouts. This disallows the film from being the umpteenth tale of the "unknowable woman," which could have easily been the case, considering Sheil's appealingly opaque acting style and the fact that Virginia is only known to Cody as a mess of pixels on his MacBook.

Mr. Gallagher's nice-guy air and naïve sense of disbelief prove a good anchor for a movie that, visually and tonally, holds back from its characters somewhat. Mr. Wigon ultimately takes refuge in the poetic, but for Cody and Virginia, it feels like too little, too late.

Reminiscent of Vertigo in many ways, with shades ofBlow Out and The Conversation, the film operates in the airless bell-jar world of a man convinced there's more going on than meets the eye. Except for its ending, which deflates the tension and makes a brief gesture toward profundity, it's an unblinking look at one man's total unraveling.

What results is an exemplary mystery, a paranoid thriller rooted in contemporary technology but not crafted to denounce it... while technology is the impetus for the case, alarmism is the furthest thing from Wigon's mind — he's much too fascinated by its implications to condemn it.

[The Heart Machine] is a rare example of a work that operates outside expected approaches, showcasing a genuine fascination with the mind/body split engendered by Skyping, online dating, and constant app usage through a plot that doesn't fuel itself on received wisdom, instead considering its isolated characters as though through an anthropological lens.

Hitchcock sneeringly referred to a certain type of spectator as "the Implausibles," and I'll chance a hanging of that one on myself given the problems I have with this otherwise interesting movie that sees the world through the prism of a broken Rear Window...

There's a healthy dash of comedy in his detective work, but tone darkens, shade by shade, as his mission turns from discovering, or rather, confirming her whereabouts to… what, exactly? Just what it is he'll do when he gets his IRL face in front of hers is the mystery that drives us across the narrative arc. Fortunately, the detours into the perfunctory commentary on the hollowness of Blendr'd encounters fail to distract.