The Heart of the World (2000)
There's a version of watching The Heart of the World where you sit back, jaw slightly open, genuinely dazzled by what Guy Maddin has pulled off in six frantic minutes. And then there's the version where you resurface afterwards, blinking, and wonder what on earth you actually just watched. Honestly, both reactions are correct at the same time, and that tension sits right at the heart of why this short is such a tricky thing to rate.
The premise alone deserves a moment of appreciation. A scientist is studying the Earth's core. Two brothers, one a gloomy mortician and the other an actor who plays Christ for a living, are locked in a bizarre romantic rivalry over her. The world is dying of a fatal heart attack. Someone needs to save it. That synopsis reads like it was scrawled on a napkin at three in the morning by a very enthusiastic film student who had just discovered Surrealism, and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible. It's unhinged. It's gloriously, unapologetically unhinged.
Visually, Maddin absolutely nails what he sets out to do. Every frame is engineered to drag you back to the manic, magical infancy of early cinema. The jerky sped-up motion, the expressionist set design, the dramatic colour tinting, the intertitles, the whole package screams 1920s avant-garde with a knowing, almost giddy affection. You can feel the love for Georges Méliès and the Surrealist fever dreams of Buñuel and Dalí baked into every single cut. If what you want is a technically inventive, hyper-kinetic piece of stylistic pastiche, this delivers it in spades. Maddin clearly has an encyclopaedic knowledge of early cinema, and his ability to replicate its chaotic energy while also pushing it somewhere stranger and wilder is genuinely impressive.
But here's where I have to be honest about my mixed feelings. Judged purely on its own terms, as a loving and meticulous recreation of early cinematic tropes, The Heart of the World does its job brilliantly. Judged as a piece of narrative cinema, though, it's a much thinner experience. The characters are caricatures by design, the plot is entirely secondary to the visual gags, and there's no real emotional traction to grab onto. It never quite becomes more than the sum of its very impressive parts. What you're left with is a fascinating museum piece: something to admire more than to feel.
I think about something like Mad God, another short-form experimental work that operates in a similarly surreal, maximalist register. What that film has, and what The Heart of the World lacks, is a genuine sense of dread and feeling underneath all the visual invention. Maddin's film is brilliant on the surface but oddly weightless beneath it. It's a triumph of style over substance, which is fine as a conscious artistic choice, though it does mean the whole thing evaporates from your memory surprisingly quickly given how much it throws at you.
I don't want to be too hard on it. It's watchable, often delightful, and it earns its reputation as a curio worth seeking out if you have any interest in experimental filmmaking or the history of the medium. Hardcore cinephiles will find plenty to enjoy here. But for a general audience, or for anyone looking for something that lingers, it's likely to feel more like a very impressive film school exercise than a genuine piece of cinema that gets under your skin.
Two and a half stars. A stylistic triumph and a narrative footnote, in equal measure.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2000 | Watched: 2026-07-08
Where to watch
Watch in the US
Stream: TPT
Physical: Amazon US
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