It’s time to take a look at one of the meanest spirited films you’ll see in a minute. I remember reading on Reddit how you can measure how mean/good spirited a film is based on the percentage of characters who end the film better or worse off than how they were when starting it. In this film all of the characters end off worse than they began so that is a pretty good indicator all around. Trust me you’ll want to skip this one and go take a walk instead.

The movie begins by introducing us to the main character John who is mute which is definitely not an easy condition to live with. Still he has done all right for himself and he is even trying to help out his friend who is mentally disabled and having a much tougher time of things. John even moves to a new town in order to stay close to the hospital where his friend will be observed and so he moves into a house with a family that’s going through some tough times of their own. Will he be able to solve all of their problems and get a nice existence for himself or is it all over for him?

One thing you will notice right away is that the film loves throwing in a lot of unnecessary subplots just to make John squirm a bit. For example it turns out that the town’s police force is corrupt and racist so they decide to violate human rights and basically do whatever they want inside the station. There’s really nothing that can even be done about it by the main characters. One doctor tries to protest and that doesn’t end up working. So ultimately this results in one of John’s friends losing his leg, the doctor having to be miserable for a decent portion of his last days, and his daughter hating him for a long while.

That didn’t go very well for John but there are other people for him to save right? Well you have the family he’s living with but the father is crippled and unable to get more work. Unfortunately there don’t appear to be any prospects there so things don’t work out. Then you have the mother who completely destroys her relationship with their daughter by not encouraging her in the school ventures and limiting her opportunities. The daughter ends up having a one night stand with someone she doesn’t even know just to spite her family and the situation that she’s in. It’s something you can’t really take back either so John wasn’t able to help these folks out. The film also makes it abundantly clear just how young she was here to add that extra edge and grit to the film to sink it even lower.

Things take a pretty dark turn for the friend that he came over here to help so that was pretty rough too. A new friend he made over in this town had started to turn things around but it all ended up going sideways on him after trying to stop a fight so he had to split town. Basically everything went wrong in the end and so John ended up losing all hope which ends with his plot going down a dark path as well. Basically the body count in this film is rather high all things considered and it’s a drama that doesn’t leave any room for hope in the end.

Part of why the film’s so bad is because there’s just nothing positive about it in the end. Each character just kept going through tragedy after tragedy until the film finally ended with every character being completely broken inside and out. I was even surprised about the final person who died because I was sure it was going to be a fake out. The film wouldn’t actually go there would it? Well, in the end it did and that was definitely not a good idea. The film would have still been really bad, don’t get me wrong. But it could have maybe at least avoided the flat 0 with a quality ending to leave things off on a good note. The film was just too determined to have the characters in a never ending cycle of suffering. Whenever you’d have a moment where something bad wasn’t happening, you just knew this meant the film was setting up the next tragedy.

At best the film does show you how tough some people have it in life and why you should always give others the benefit of the doubt. It’s why they say not to judge someone on your first encounter since they could be having a bad day or something like that. You just never know after all, these characters all would have been having some really bad days that’s for sure. From the 5 senses, losing my sight would probably be the scariest. It’s just tough not to be able to see anything but all 5 are known as critical parts of you for a reason. Losing any one of them immediately makes life a lot harder so I have a lot of respect for those who forge their paths ahead despite that. It’s also why a happier ending here would have also been a lot more satisfying.

Overall, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a movie definitely trying to convince you that at the end of the day you will not be able to help enough people. There will always be more problems and they will eventually consume you. It’s definitely a very sad way to look at things. Of course it is not possible to solve all problems which is why they say it’s best not to look at the news too much so you don’t get tragedy fatigue. Just solve the problems you can and keep moving forward. One first step to doing this is to completely skip this film. At all costs you do not want to check it out. Whether it’s the big tragedies that happen in the film or the little ones like spoiling a party and losing all of your friends in one shot, this movie loves to pile onto the main characters.

Overall 0/10