Once you get comfortable with the extremely outlandish concept of With Love and a Major Organ, there is a film that should be both relevant and relatable. The central idea is insane, but it is no gimmick. A world where emotion can be controlled through science and you can literally rip your heart out is very much Black Mirror-ish, but the treatment of Kim Albright’s film is deliberately mellow. The plot is wobbly though, and I thought the climax was pretty messy, but the film should still get appreciation for doing something as daring as this. So what are we doing in this article? Putting the film under the microscope and attempting to see it through the lens of simplification, of course.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens in the Movie?
Imagine your life being fully managed by an app. Everything, from what to eat to when to sleep to what to say and who to date, is dictated to you by the app. I honestly don’t think it’s a good idea, but the characters in this movie are completely blown away by this app called LifeZap. The only exception is Anabel, an artist and insurance worker who witnesses a man ripping his heart right out of his chest. Yes, that’s a thing that happens in this world. And these hearts can actually be anything, from animals to lanterns to so many other things. Without the heart, you die, but not instantly. You are fine initially, then you start coughing up sand until you finally start bleeding and the inside of you goes completely dry. Yeah, the biology is not relatable in this movie, but that’s hardly a bother.
While taking her lunch at a park, Anabel bumps into this random young man named George. It’s pretty much love at first sight for her, as she falls head over heels for him. Sadly, when she pours her heart out to George, he fails to reciprocate. Although he is a nice man, he doesn’t feel any emotion. Broken-hearted Anabel tries desperately to move on, but it seems to be impossible. Even going to a facility that is designed to help you balance your emotions doesn’t seem to help. Her relationship with LifeZap-clad best friend and colleague Casey also gets sour when Anabelle throws her a bachelorette party in her own way instead of following the guidelines of the app. What’s even worse? Her mother, Kay, continuously refused to meet her and abruptly died one day.
Why does Anabel take her heart out?
What do you do when you can’t take the misery anymore? You rip the heart out of your chest—in this case, quite literally. That’s exactly what Anabel does, and she sends it to George in a box, cursing him with eternal guilt. Her heart is a lantern, and George instinctively takes his own out and replaces it with hers. Magic happens after that. George not only starts to feel things; he also starts seeing the world from a totally different perspective. He starts being nice to people, refuses to eat boring fish that his mother cooks every single day, and also starts satisfying his wishes and cravings, most notably eating pizza. When his daunting mother, Mona, gets concerned about this sudden change in her son, George leaves. He leaves a note to Mona, requesting that she give Anabel the empty box and also saying sorry for how he treated her. Out in the world, free and full of life, George goes on to explore further and ends up sleeping with a stranger.
Unfortunately, George’s discovery of “living” comes at the expense of Anabel totally embracing the darkness. Without the heart, she stops feeling anything. She turns into this stern, almost robotic human being with a full subscription to LifeZap. She arranges her own mother’s funeral without shedding a single tear. She doesn’t even hesitate to tell a genuinely worried Cassey that there’s no point in them being friends.
Does George give Anabel her heart back?
Here’s where the problem lies: With Love and a Major Organ initially comes off as a quirky romance between Anabel and George. But in the final act, the plot goes pretty much haywire as it sort of becomes a “retrieving my heart from the one who broke it” mission for Anabel. Not that she signs up for it on her own. She has given up on life since the moment she decided to remove the heart. All that’s left is vomiting, sand, and bleeding to death. But Mona can’t let that happen. She has to get to her son, and who else but Anabel can help her with it? With Anabel’s heart beating inside him, it’s only natural for George to go to a place that’s special to her—the cabin, where Anabel always liked to go with her mother. On the way to the cabin, Mona shares George’s backstory with Anabel, which honestly feels like overkill at this point. It is already established by the movie that the whole point of life is having a heart and feeling things, and without that, we’re not really living. It also subtly says to us that pain is a necessary emotion, one that we should learn to live with.
Mona wanted George to be free of it, so she replaced his original heart—a seashell crab—with a heart made of paper. George was born to two broken-hearted people, so Mona couldn’t risk it. But fate clearly had other plans, as George now feels everything. That said, he has basically stolen another person’s heart, and it’s only fair that he return it to Anabel. When Mona finally finds him, he doesn’t want to part ways with this new heart. But seeing Anabel, he also realizes that this is not how it should be. So George takes his heart out and hands it carefully back to the original owner. Thanks to that, Anabel lives as the lantern continues to glow inside her.
With Love and a Major Organ ends with George knocking at Anabel’s door outside the cabin. He feels things now, maybe not as much as Anabel, but he still does. Will he finally fall in love with her? We don’t know for sure and can’t really tell. This story is not about that, anyway.
