Final Rating: 4/5
Mickey Reece has been an absolute workhorse in the DIY filmmaking community. Having directed 30 feature films and plenty more shorts since just 2008, he outpaces even the most prodigious filmmakers. The first time I became aware of him was from his last film, Country Gold, which also played at Fantasia back in 2022. He’s back with Every Heavy Thing, and this won’t be the last time I watch his work as it was impressive as hell.
Josh Fadem stars as Joe, an “almost cool” guy who sells ads at a weekly alternative publication in Hightown City. Hightown is rapidly growing into a hub for tech bros to bring their companies into. The people also live in worrying times, as fears of some sort of catastrophic event get brought up in passing from time to time. There also seems to be an epidemic of women going missing, with the news telling viewers it is at least five confirmed disappearances when the movie begins.
Joe gets dragged to a concert at a small venue by one of his co-workers who really wants to see Whitney Bluewill (Barbara Crampton) perform. Despite not wanting to actually go, Joe ends up enjoying Bluewill’s set and afterwards when he sees her outside having a smoke, approaches her to strike up a conversation. In that moment she is murdered and when Joe tries to drive away, the killer reveals himself in the backseat of his car. Dressed in an all black motorcycle suit and black helmet (looking like the hatchet wielding killer in the giallo film What Have They Done to Your Daughters?), the man reveals himself to William Shaffer (James Urbaniak), one of the new tech CEOs, to call Hightown home.
Shaffer doesn’t want to just silence Joe, but instead wants to play a game with him. Joe must never reveal Shaffer’s involvement or else he will be killed. Otherwise he is free to go about his life. Reality kicks in quickly for Joe as seeing someone killed in cold blood would traumatize anyone. Immediately he can’t sleep, can’t focus on work and shuts out his girlfriend Lux (Tipper Newton), who is desperately trying to have a serious conversation with him.
From there things just get worse. Joe begins to have nightmares, like he is stuck inside the killer’s tech infused dreams. The worse his spiralling gets, the more suspicious he looks, especially since a new female co-worker might have a lead on the killer and the police want to have a chat with Joe.
The film puts Mickey Reece’s talents on full display, as he uses every trick in a filmmaker’s pocket to craft this taught technothriller. We get split diopters, split screens, changing aspect ratios, grain and distortion to the image, text messages shown on screen, changing perspectives of characters and more. What could come off as a filmmaker trying to show off skills they have amassed over the years of experimentation, instead works to show the fragile and damaged psyche of the main character.
The film seems to have a wide range of influences from Michael Mann’s own technothriller Blackhat, that features similar computer imagery, to the Saw franchise where both Jigsaw and Shaffer repeatedly ask if people want to play a game, to Blue Velvet with the mysterious lounge singer, to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut since both films use sex and violence to disorient their lead characters. Another Eyes Wide Shut connection, is in the credits there are several original songs in Every Heavy Thing that are written by Nick Nightingale, the fictitious name of the piano player who knows too much played by Todd Field in the Kubrick film. Looking up Nightingale, you only get results related to Eyes Wide Shut, but considering the subject matter and that Reece has written music for some of his other films, suggest he might be behind the cheeky moniker.
The film definitely has deep thoughts on its mind as on the surface it deals with impending AI takeover, the shrinking middle class, violence against women, gun fanaticism, trans rights, repressed homosexuality and much more. There are a lot of ideas swirling around, but Reece manages to keep them contained to tell a story that feels both grounded and out of this world, not to mention adding a nice dose of humour.
Josh Fadem excels as Joe, a guy who you think would be fun to grab a beer with, until you realize too late that he’s just not that interesting. He’s smart, but not exactly clever and an excellent protagonist to go down this journey with because until he cleans up his own act, maybe he deserves a little punishment too. The film also gets great supporting turns from veteran actors like James Urbaniak and horror icon Barbara Crampton, and rising DIY filmmaker Vera Drew (The People’s Joker) who plays Joe’s only high school friend but hasn’t seen him since her transition.
This may be my first Mickey Reece film, but seeing what he can do with a modest budget, a lot of hard work and a great story to tell is more than enough to keep me coming back for more. For horror fans that are sick of the mainstream slop that gets released, Every Heavy Thing is the perfect antidote to get something new.
Thank you to Fantasia Festival for the screener.
