Heart [1999]

This rare British attempt at horror melodrama opens strikingly with bloodied Maria Ann McCardle [Saskia Reeves] travelling by train with a human heart in a plastic bag and trying to bury the organ in the grave of her recently-deceased son. Confessing to the police, with a religious dimension added by her job in a Catholic school, Maria Ann recounts the situation that has led to this incident. Gary [Christopher Eccleston], a pilot whose terminal jealousy has caused a severe heart condition, receives the heart of Maria Ann's son, killed in a road accident, and finds his already-complex marriage to TV producer Tess [Kate Hardie] further troubled by the gradual invasion of the grieving but creepy Maria Ann [whose relationship with the dead boy verged on incest] and the occasional presence of Tess's volatile on-off lover, shotgun-wielding Welsh writer Alex [Rhys Ifans].

With various heart-themed pop songs on the soundtrack ['Anyone Who Had a Heart', 'This Old Heart of Mine'] and throwaway lines like 'I've had a change of heart', this is clearly not concerned with credibility and indeed builds up to a gory climax of multiple deaths which embodies various meanings of the term 'heart-breaking'. In a British version of the 'home invasion' psycho-thriller, fanatical single mum Maria Ann is contrasted with the loose-living upper middle-class couple, put out because Tess has opted for a career rather than children and bringing fresh vegetables in place of the pre-packed food the busy TV exec serves.

Jimmy McGovern's script flirts with the Hands of Orlac notion of the recipient who takes on the donor's personality, as doormat Gary puts on the dead boy's boxing gloves to give Alex a beating, but the film is more concerned with exploring Maria Ann's broadly-scripted but subtly-played psychoses as she confesses to a crime she didn't commit so she can go to jail and [in a steal from La maree etait en noir] get close enough to her son's killer to commit an off-screen revenge murder. Directed by Charles McDougall.

First published in this form here.

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