User Reviews

The story takes place in a very dark, threatening and violent London, more fantasy than reality but nevertheless, the environment serves its cinematic purpose as it makes the viewer feel unsettled. The photography is excellent with extended shots of the city at night and in the early hours. This fits well given the photography theme that runs through the movie. As others have observed, the key question is what is real and what is in the central characters mind - is he suffering from a terrible mental illness that gives him visions and voices in the head? Some elements of this reminded me of the Clive Barker stories with (possibly?) horrible demons lurking beneath the surface of our lives but the uncertainty ensures the plot has an edge that keeps you guessing to the end. This is an original and unusual film, more thought provoking than is typical of the genre, well made with a cast that all put in quality performances. It held my attention for the duration, neither me nor my partner spoke while we watched, which is always a good sign. Recommended if you're in the mood for a gripping journey to the dark side.

*May be spoilers*

Jamie is born with facial/body defects which he feels hampers his life and his chances for love. In a world of escalating violence, which personally affects him when he loses his mother, he is offered the chance for the life he wants at the cost of more violence by a strange character.

I wasn't familiar with the director's previous works and watched this film with limited knowledge of what it was about barring the few reviews here on IMDb. This film was quite trippy and definitely a bit insane....but all in a good way.

All the way through the film I was trying to guess where it was going, what the conclusion would be, what the twist would be. Every time I felt I'd settled on something the film took another direction. This in itself makes for entertainment when watching something - continuing to watch to see where a film goes and to find out exactly what was going on....I've even come back on here and used google to find other reviews to try and clarify some points in the film which have left me a bit confused.

There was a clever mix of genres in this film as it plays mainly as horror but has elements of drama/thriller and comedy - and they all work.

'Heartless' is not without it's flaws and it does begin to feel like it's dragging around the 85 min mark. You may also come away from watching feeling some mild confusion as I do not think everything was explained as clearly as it may have been (or might just be me).

This film is certainly different and entertaining to boot....which are 2 things combined that you don't too often find nowadays when watching a film.

In East London, Jamie Morgan (Jim Sturgess) is a disturbed twenty-five year old photographer that misses his deceased father and has a complex due to his birthmark on the left side of his face and shoulder, wearing a hood on the streets to hide his face. In his neighborhood, the gangs have increased violence and there are a series of unresolved brutal murders in the area. One night, Jamie overhears screams on the street and he sees demons around a campfire. Jamie lives a reclusive life with his beloved mother Marion (Ruth Sheen) and works in a studio with his brother Ray (Justin Salinger) and his nephew Lee (Luke Treadaway). When Jamie sees the aspirant model Tia (Clémence Poésy) photographed by Ray and Lee, he has a crush on her and brings one picture of Tia to his home. On the birthday of Marion, Lee gives an expensive jewel to his grandmother. When Jamie visits the tombstone of his father in the cemetery with his mother, they are attacked in the bus stop by a gang of demons and Marion is burned to death and Jamie is battered. Then his neighbor and former gang member A.J. (Noel Clarke) is murdered on the streets. Jamie buys a pistol for self-protection and is ready to commit suicide; however he is summoned by the devil Papa B (Joseph Mawle) in the Cendrillon House, the building where his father lived. When he meets Papa B and his young assistant Belle (Nikita Mistry), the devil proposes a deal to him. Jamie should rebirth as a Phoenix without his birthmark, provided he meets the Weapons Man (Eddie Marsan) and vandalizes and brings chaos to Papa B. Jamie becomes self- confident and when he meets Tia by chance, he dates her. However, the Weapons Man visits him and tells that he must collect a heart and leave it on the stairway of a church. Jamie kills a male hustler and accomplishes his assignment. However, when Papa B demands the heart of Tia, Jamie faces his own demons and discovers the truth about his troubled mind.

"Heartless" is the third film of Philip Ridley that I have seen ("The Reflecting Skin" was my first, and "The Passion of Darkly Noon" was the other one). Philip Ridley is a complete artist and for those readers that do not know, he is also a writer of novels and plays for adults and children, painter, photographer, poet and song writer. "Heartless" is dark, complex and as usual, Philip Ridley explores religious symbols along the story. The performances are top-notch and the conclusion explains the bad trip of Jamie; who are the demons; who is Belle indeed; and why he has met and dated Tia. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Marca da Vingança" ("Mark of the Revenge")

The main problem with 'Heartless,' in my opinion, is the script. The actors' lines are so riddled with clichés that it's hard to take any of it seriously. There are hundreds of things that people do and say in films that they never do or say in real life. Many of these stock lines and stock actions make appearances in 'Heartless.' I found it difficult to feel any compassion for any of the characters because of this, and because the actors were working up a storm to fight their way through the clichés. Here is the spoiler: really? A gay hustler? Tired. Oh so very tired.

There is some talent here. The camera work is good. The lighting, the color choice are quite nice. But all in all, 'Heartless' is not very good at all.

I have seen a lot worse than Heartless. You could see some thought went into this and its not just a run of the mill US slasher movie where air head boring teenagers have sex then get dispatched in various ways. The first thing that attracted me to the movie was the story - which was described as a group of hoodies going round killing people wearing demon masks but the main character really thinks they really are demons running amok in London! Sounds good to me. However that is a very bare bones watered down version of what turns out to be a complicated film with a few plot threads running all at once. I found this to be a bit much as we basically have a guy born with a huge birth mark across his face finds mixing difficult, is lonely and frustrated with his life. There are also signs he has tried to commit suicide in the past. His father died years back and he lives and seems very close to his mother. There is of course the hoodies with the demon faces, the meeting with the devil to make a deal to rid him of his birthmark, the little girl that helps him and calls him 'dad',the love story with the girl from Harry Potter, the grizzly tasks he is asked to commit as part of the deal, the side story of his brothers son and the drug baron with the claws on his arm ... It felt like it started as one film and ended another which shows the flow wasn't quite there. I will say this - it is really well shot and directed. The guy that plays the 'devil' was really good. The main actor was pretty good and so was the music. However like this review its confusing, patchy and I feel with a little more focus could have been better. Like I said I've seen worse and overall it was satisfying.

...but with a beat that's arrhythmic at best, "Heartless" suffers from a distinct case of artsy-fartsy pretension and disjointed storytelling. Jim "Across the Universe" Sturgess is quite good as the doomed protagonist who strikes a Faustian deal in search of release from inner torments, but writer/director Philip "The Krays" Ridley indulges in far too much easy symbolism to deliver a satisfying morality play; he needs a brush-up lesson with Syd Field. Truthfully, there's a lot to like about "Heartless," but the simplistic, muddled plot isn't really dark enough (or clever enough) to properly illuminate the psychodrama its creator wishes to convey. All the elements are there--nice DP work, a decent supporting cast (with the possible exception of the romantic interest), an evocative score and soundtrack--but it all boils down to the unsatisfying script. Worth the free watch I enjoyed courtesy of my local library, but sadly I can't recommend searching this one out; there are simply so many better thematically similar films out there. "Jacob's Ladder" springs instantly to mind.

This is one of those muddled scripts that is usually written by an over-ambitious greenhorn who thinks that he can cram all his personal obsessions into his first movie, by force if need be. Sort of like packing up for a trip, having only one small bag to carry, and then you cram stuff into it, sit on it, etc. The fact that an experienced writer, not a novice, came up with this crap is all the more embarrassing.

A horror film with a social message? Not again. You certainly don't have to be a young writer to have idiotic intentions like that; just take a look at George Romero and some of his daft socio-political zombie films (the recent ones): the more "meaningful messages" he tries to stuff inside them, the dumber these movies turn out.

A young man (Morgan), with large birthmarks all over his face and body, witnesses a gang of demons one night. Soon people in London are being randomly murdered by them. And soon enough, they kill his mother. He is invited to meet their leader, who looks like a Russian mobster with a taste for heroine, but is in actual fact Satan or something or other. Satan gives him some goofy theory on how random violence improves mankind, and then tells him that his mother was killed "so that we could get you to enlist". I kid you not. No, I don't understand the logic of this either. It does get dumber, however.

Satan offers Morgan a new face, no more debilitating birthmarks, in return for committing evil acts. Couldn't he have just ASKED him? Morgan was desperate as it is to have a new face. Killing his mother could have only prevented recruiting him, not helped. But it gets better: Morgan actually agrees, making a deal with the individual who had his mother brutally burnt to death in front of his own eyes! Sure makes sense, doesn't it.

The demon has a young Indian girl, dressed in full traditional Indian regalia, acting as his… helper? Good-luck charm? Daughter? Assistant? Who the hell knows, but the girl adds much-needed unintentional comedy into this bleak mess of a film. Her behaviour is so over-the-top absurd and self-contradicting that any attempt to figure out what the director/writer wanted to achieve with this character is a complete and utter waste of time. All I can see is her being constantly abused as a silly plot-device so that all sorts of nonsense can happen later on.

Morgan is visited by the "weapons guy", a cliché character right out of a Guy Ritchie comedy-caper. But it's just another bizarre, idiotic turn out of many in this shamelessly pointless movie.

At this point things get a little predictable – and even more ridiculous. Obviously, it will not suffice for Morgan to just draw "God is a moron" graffiti as he'd been falsely instructed to do (such a transparent gimmick), in order to fulfill his end of the Faustian bargain, in return for getting a new face. He has to commit murder. Surprise. Who didn't see that one coming. Yawn. Morgan is not only a weak-willed pushover, he must be an utter idiot too. (The way he fails to realize that the Indian girl is just toying with him, manipulating everything, is amazing. A cretin would have figured it out.)

His first victim is a male prostitute right out of a bloody silly comedy; a totally unrealistic character, suitably exaggerated (dumb and over-the-top) just so Morgan could kill him with ease. What person – especially a male prostitute who must be aware of the dangers of going to the homes of unknown men (especially someone behaving as strangely as Morgan) – lets themselves be rolled up in tape, mummy-wise, around the entire body by a complete stranger?

To cut a dumb, long story short, one murder wasn't enough, and he has to kill again – his own girlfriend this time, played by Clemence Poesy - that awful nepotistic actress that appeared in one of the many dumb Harry Potter flicks. Using a hopelessly botched accent, and looking rather ugly, she is suddenly Morgan's love-interest. He has a new face, and straight away he hooks up with the first female he meets. Ts, ts, ts; typical nerd.

The last half-hour is a complete mess. Predictable plot-twists, moronic plot-twists, and then an utterly daft, "philosophical" vision-of-daddy ending that doesn't tie into anything in any way, let alone neatly. "Heartless" is brainless, aimed at God-know-which demographic group. This piece of crap wouldn't develop a cult following if it were to play five thousand weeks in a row in a seedy cinema near you. Avoid this garbage at all cost.

I really liked the idea of a horror movie set in East London - where, coincidentally, I live. Seeing Jim Sturgess' character Jamie mooching around streets that I walk on my way to work was a lot of fun.

And Philip Ridley attempts to do something different with the genre, trying to mix supernatural and social conscience. It kind of almost works, but like so many movies in this subject-space, it all goes a bit to hell-in-a-handbasket in the final reel.

For me the ending is too much of a cop-out. I was hoping Ridley was going to come up with a better solution to the story than what we got. Very disappointing for the "demons" to be just hoodie, ASBO thugs after all. So I was left thinking that Papa B and Belle were just figments of Jamie's imagination. Now maybe that wasn't what Ridley was trying to put over, but that was what I was getting.

What we're left with is a Scooby-Doo type story, where the demons of Bethnal Green just turned out to be "old man Clanton, the creepy caretaker in a mask."

And, Philip, you'd have gotten away with it, to, if it hadn't been (etc, etc) ...

Well, this is my first review on IMDb, but I really felt that I had to do this. When I chose the next movie I'm gonna watch, I usually do a quick research about it if that's an unknown movie, and as I've never heard of this one before, I came here and saw quite a reasonable score, with some great reviews, then I thought: WOW dude, this movie may kick ass!!!

I really enjoy horror genre, and it's one of my favorite genres. At the first 3 minutes watching this movie I just felt really excited, it really looked like it was gonna be some scary horror, and entertaining enough to not even pause to go drink water if I felt thirsty. Well, I was mistaken, as I kept watching this piece of crap, I was trying to figure out if the demons were really demons, or if the main character were going nuts. Some time later, what I just figured out, was ME going nuts. As someone said before the movie was totally incomprehensible.

The dialog is terrible and at times the acting is almost laughable. There's no story. No plot. No believable characters. No dialog. No scares. No decent effects.

I really don't know what's going on with modern movies, but it looks like they're losing quality. Even though I don't criticize them that much. But for this one I really felt fooled, and no way it could be a 6.1 rated movie. IT REALLY SUCKS!!!!!!

If you have anything else to do besides watching this movie, go do it! Just don't lose almost 2 hours of your life watching this, you'll felt stolen and fooled!

I can't really make my mind up about this one, simply because it hides its real meaning behind a complex combination of ideas and references about life, beauty and religion without ever really arriving at a tangible conclusion. For this reason it remains a little too unconvincing to count as anything meaningful, and cheapens anything it might have had to say by falling back on what is becoming a hoary old cliché at its conclusion.

Jim Sturgess gives an entirely believable performance as Jamie, a withdrawn young man cursed with a heart-shaped birth mark on his face who embarks on a descent into insanity provoked by the run-down urban environment in which he lives. He believes the young hoodies who haunt the streets of London's East End really are demons – even though they're only kids wearing demon masks in truth – and his tortured mind conjures up a twisted fantasy that ends in murder and his own death. It's a death which brings relief and takes him to a place where he was only ever really happy.

The story is impenetrable at times – not because you can't understand what's going on but because you are fed so little information that it's difficult to understand *why* the things we see have happened. Films like this usually become clearer following some reflection after the credits have rolled, but this one resolutely refuses to make firm sense. The meaning (or reality) of too many characters is left so open to personal interpretation that any analysis becomes futile. Philip Ridley is clearly a highly talented individual, but it seems that the abundance of ideas has overwhelmed him.

On the positive side, the film develops a strong atmosphere of foreboding. It manages to deliver some unexpected twists and jolts and is always intriguing. It reminded me a lot of the kind of thing Clive Barker would write, anchoring its story in a dreary but recognisable physical and mental landscape while forsaking any commercial ambitions in the pursuit of a unique – if apparently confused – personal vision.