Writer and director Mickey Reece (Agnes, Climate of the Hunter) returns to Fantasia Festival with the world premiere of his latest film, Every Heavy Thing. The comedy-thriller opens to the bare breasts of a woman called Birdie (Bethany Jester) who is talking on the phone to her friend about how she’s sick of Hightown City and wants to move to Maine. After covering herself with a long shirt and hanging up the phone, Birdie meets her demise when she’s murdered by a man with a gun.
The local news reports of women going missing before announcing that tech-based companies opening up in the area will create new job opportunities. Could the two be related? It turns out, yes! When your average Joe (Josh Fadem, Better Call Saul), who sells ads for the city’s periodical, Metro Weekly, witnesses the murder of jazz club singer Whitney Bluewill (Barbara Crampton, Re-Animator), he is confronted by the killer who immediately reveals his face and full name. Tech billionaire William Schaffer (James Urbaniak, Oppenheimer) blackmails Joe into silence, explaining he’s now part of his new experiment: if Joe tells anyone what he saw tonight, he’ll be dead within the hour.
Joe returns to his nothing life unable to tell his boss (John Ennis, Zodiac), his parents (Ginger Gilmartin and Ben Hall), his high school best friend Alex (Vera Drew, The People’s Joker), or even his girlfriend Lux (Tipper Newton, The Mindy Project), who has secrets of her own, about what he saw that night. Things get worse for Joe when new reporter Cheyenne (newcomer Kaylene Snarsky) starts working at Metro Weekly and begins investigating the disappearances in Hightown City. With Joe under the watchful eye of Schaffer, he begins to experience strange dreams and hallucinations that make him feel like he’s losing his mind. As his guilt and paranoia worsens, Joe is forced to examine how complaisant he is in his own life and the community he lives in.
Reece opts for an experimental lo-fi visual style, often employing trippy vaporwave-inspired digital art with the retro, analogue feel of effects like VHS tape glitching and distortion. This is combined with longtime collaborator Nicholas Poss’s layered sound design, featuring electronic sounds, static, and even interference noise as a motif for William. These help Reece push the boundaries of cinema, which are a strength of the film, with other techniques such as bold transitions and the use of split screen helping to create the film’s unique style.
The cast turn in strong performances, though Fadem’s Josh is a little blah. He’s interesting in the sense that the character is reacting to life happening not just around him, but to him. Crampton plays against type in a small yet alluring role that makes you wish you saw more of her. It’s one that carries the intrigue of a mysterious and seductive character met briefly in a David Lynch film. Reece enjoys creating pastiche of Lynch and slasher movies while also subverting expectations of the thriller genre by solving the film’s mystery at the start. He points to a different fear instead: the potential threats of technological advances and the power and corruption of those who often wield them.
While the idea of people being too distracted by the horrors of the world to notice that America is heading towards a surveillance state is a powerful idea to explore, the film’s stylistic flourishes can’t save it from its weakly written story. Narratively, it grows dull despite its short runtime of 89 minutes. With the murder mystery wrapped up from the start, Reece’s other themes needed to be stronger to keep this one from losing its steam.
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