Reel Review: With Love And A Major Organ

Poetic, compelling, and quirky, “With Love And A Major Organ” is a standout film with a lot of heart, but it might leave some feeling empty.

With Love and a Major Organ is a complex film that truly demands your full attention. With a mixture of genres, it’s something you’ve probably not experienced before. With real and raw emotions permeating every frame, it’s a science fiction story that runs a lot deeper than it may appear.

Beginning life as a stage play of the same name by Julia Lederer, this is a world where people’s hearts can be ripped right out — literally.

Directed by Kim Albright, With Love and a Major Organ imagines a future where people can finally take a stand against the pain of heartbreak and devastating emotions. Hearts can be removed and replaced with inanimate objects, suppressing all those pesky emotions and feelings.

In this “brave new world,” technology has completely taken over in the form of an app called LifeZap that scans you and controls every aspect of your life while collecting your data for its own use. Self-care looks a lot more like permanent sedation, and humanity is stripped of everything that defines us — sacrificing all the good to eliminate the bad.

In this bleak reality, we find our protagonist, Anabel (Anna Maguire). Despite living in a world of somber tones and depressive colors, she has not lost her spark. She remains a vibrant and complex human with a full emotional range, a passion for art, and a quirky but lovable personality.

Of course, like many complicated humans, she doesn’t have it all together. 

She desperately searches for love in strange places and tries to connect to those around her. She’s a free spirit, which is not embraced in this new world.

On the other side of the spectrum is George (Hamza Haq), who struggles to socialize and is very quiet, keeping to himself mostly. He’s lived an unexciting and uneventful life. Anabel falls for him, but he rejects her because LifeZap has deemed her an unsuitable partner.

Heartbroken, she makes the painful decision to remove her own heart so she can finally be a part of normal society and feel as if she fits in. She sends the heart to George, who places it in his own chest. He begins to experience genuine emotion and individuality for the first time in his life.

Feeling born again, he runs away — again, literally stealing Anabel’s heart.

The strong performances in With Love and a Major Organ really elevate the material and make the film more engaging.

However, for me, the plot felt a bit too convoluted and hard to follow.

I have to give credit to the fact it dares to do something different, creating a whole new world from the ground up and a future that feels relevant to today.

Still, as much as I wanted to love it, it lacked the emotional gravitas and profound effect I felt it was going for.

A times, it almost feels like this film stops dead and really comes to a standstill, and it feels much longer than its runtime. It’s intentionally quirky and unusual, but I felt it could have benefited from more subtlety and more straightforward storytelling.

I definitely enjoyed aspects of the film. As I mentioned, the performances are stellar. It is also lovely to look at. The cinematography is exceptional, saving the dreary world of the film with bursts of neon colors that are visually stunning.

I can absolutely see an audience that will delight in every minute of this offbeat film. It has certainly received its share of glowing reviews from the festival circuit, with critics praising its unique execution, emotional impact, and clever sci-fi take on relatable and universal themes of love and loneliness. Thus, if you’re someone who

Ultimately, it feels a bit inaccessible and perhaps is a story that worked much better as a stage play yet loses something in the translation to film.

Still, one has to admire the originality and the bold swings that are taken, even if all of those swings don’t quite land.