With Love and a Major Organ: Quirky, offbeat, & oddly endearing

With Love and a Major Organ defies classification. It has dystopian elements, and it's also an endearing and offbeat indie film with a heck of a lot of well, heart. if anything, by the end credits, you'll certainly feel something and embrace its creative premise. It's also bolstered by its lead performances who make for an unlikely, yet adorable pairing.

Directed by Kim Albright and loosely based on the play by Julia Lederer, the film stars Anna Maguire as Anabel, an aspiring painter who sells "virtual insurance" to protect people in case they loose files in the cloud, can't find their playlists, or have other online mishaps. Anabel, however, doesn't really want to work a boring 9-5 or sit behind a desk. No, she longs for something more in life.
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Anabel meets another office drone, George (Hamza Haq). Quickly, Anabel falls in love with him and eventually gifts him her heart by ripping it out of her chest and sending it to him in a cooler with a tape recording of why exactly she's doing such. As absurd as the premise may seem, the execution works. In this world, people can indeed tear out their hearts to gift to others, and everyone's heart is a different object. In fact, Anabel gets the idea because in the film's opening minutes, she witnesses someone else do this.

The problem is, however, once Anabel gifts her heart, she has a gaping wound in her chest that needs to be filled or she'll die. In fact, George's overbearing mother tells him as much, though he doesn't really want to listen because Anabel's heart makes him feel again. It encourages him to step beyond his comfort zone and actually start living life.

This film is set in what seems to be the not-too-distant future, at least if you base it on Anabel's job or George's, which, as he puts it, just involves pointing, clicking, and scrolling. There's also an app for every single thing imaginable. Yet, no one in the film seems all that happy and everyone is disconnected, especially Anabel and George. Both characters long to feel something, anything, that's authentic. There's even a hall of emotions characters can visit, but even that seems surface-level.

Albright really succeeds here in crafting a world that, on the one hand, feels very dystopian because of the technology, while on the other hand, quite fantastical, at least the premise about the hearts. Yet, she also grounds the film in a very real and tangible premise, that being the longing for human connection. That's what makes this film so charming and relatable.

Even if With Love and a Major Organ is about lonely people pining for connection, it'll make you feel good by the end credits. This is a wildly inventive feature with a heck of a lot of heart. It opens in additional theaters this weekend.