With Love and a Major Organ: A Gently Dystopian Dramedy with Abundant Heart

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

With Love and a Major Organ is directed by Kim Albright, based on a play of the same name; both written by Julia Lederer. It’s set in a near future that has become equal parts dystopia and drudgery — call it drudge-topia. Or dystrudgery. Easier to say; harder to spell. Your choice.

Anyway, it’s a world where the daily newspaper has splashes like “Climate Change Declared Irreversible.” Where a popular product, the Efficient Nutritient Bar, is sold under the slogan: “Full in four bites.” And where people use a program called LifeZapp to make all major decisions.

Living in this world but not enjoying it very much is Anabel (Anna Maguire), who has the soul of an artist. Or more precisely, the heart of one. Because another quirk of this almost-our-world is that people can remove their hearts and still go on living, at least for longer than we’d consider normal.

Anabel meets George (Hamza Haq), a fellow lunchtime park bench sitter whose job consists of pointing, clicking, and scrolling. (Anabel works for a virtual insurance firm that offers counselling services for when the cloud loses all your photos.) She falls hard for him and sends him a tape cassette full of sweet poetic nothings. When that doesn’t move him, she gives him her heart — again, literally. In a cooler for safe keeping.

The swap has dramatic effects on both their lives. George starts to feel things he never felt before. Anabel feels nothing, even when someone close to her dies. (It doesn’t help that eulogies in this bizarro world consist of: “She was nice, until she wasn’t. She died at a younger age than expected.”)

Albright does a wonderful job of constructing an oddly affecting science-fiction realm that sits at the emotional cusp of believable and enchanting. It’s there in the little details, like the fact that George’s address is on Avenue Road, in a city called Here, in the district of Larger Place, and with a postal code that starts with an F. (Here in Canada, where the film was made, we use one of 18 letters to start our postal codes, and F isn’t one of them.)

Maguire and Haq have some lovely chemistry, and Donna Benedicto is perfect as Anabel’s friend, workmate, and foil to her emotional outbursts. (We all have our Anabel moments, the feeling that we’re analogue creatures trapped in a digital simulacrum of life.)

I’ve been looking through comments from the film’s festival run and finding a lot of references to it being a kind of kinder Kaufman, with one going so far as to say comparisons to other works stop there.

But I beg to differ. With Love and a Major Organ reminded me a little of Cold Souls, a wonderful dry comedy from 2009 in which Paul Giamatti has a soul-ectomy. It brushes up ever so lightly against Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And there’s a little of early-ish Yorgos Lanthimos (Alps, The Lobster). Except, you know, more heart. Much more heart.

With Love and a Major Organ. Directed by Kim Albright. Starring Anna Maguire, Hamza Haq, and Donna Benedicto. In theatres April 12.