Five-Legged Iguana

A Rundown of the 13 Best Horror Movies I’ve Seen in the Past Year
[12 of 13]
HEARTLESS (August 2009)


Ever since Philip Ridley made me stand up and pay attention with The Reflecting Skin, I’ve waited for his return to the cinema. Thus, having missed the opportunity to see The Passion of Darkly Noon, it was with a fair amount of excitement that I looked forward to Heartless; I wasn’t disappointed.
Though Ridley’s Faustian Heartless (with Jim Sturgess as the luckless schmuck who falls for the Devil’s siren song) is much closer to the mainstream than The Reflecting Skin was, it’s nonetheless a beautifully constructed piece that allows a smidgen of ambiguity to inform its climax, setting it above the majority of other films that follow its by-now familiar narrative structure.
And Sturgess also sings songs that are on the film’s soundtrack (as he did on Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe), so aside from suffering at the diabolical whims of Old Nick, he also gets to exercise his pipes.
At the very least, it’s an interesting deal he got himself into…

(Heartless OS courtesy of cinematical.com.)