EssenceStory
Well Deserved Praise
Salubfoto
It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.
Taha Avalos
The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"Dead Hearts" is a Canadian English-language film from 2014, so it is still relatively new and fresh. It is the most recent and most successful work for writer and director Stephen W. Martin and it is basically the ballad of Milton and Lola and Harold, who is vying for Lola's affections too. We see them as kids and also as seniors and eventually even as zombies. Quite a lot for under 20 minutes. I myself can only say that I do not agree with the great deal of awards attention that makes this one look like one of the best short films from 3 years ago. The childhood part was still fine, but everything afterward was a mess and not really funny: the way they rise from the grave, her fighting skills despite being blind, Harold's final fate, which probably explains why IMDb also lists horror as a genre here etc. The comedy is fairly dark, but rarely funny and admittedly this is the only genre I would attribute to this film. As a whole, I have to give it a thumbs-down, a very showy film yes, but not a memorable 17 minutes at all, which is a pity as the narrator wasn't bad. Cast members are not famous at all here. Watch something else instead.
bob the moo
A tale of love, death, kung-fu, and monsters. This short film is really on a knife's edge of whether or not it will work for you. The tone is relentlessly whimsical, but at the same time frequently heads off into silliness and excess; many other short films will show you how hard this is to get right (a lot of people want to be Wes Anderson) so at least Dead Hearts deserves the credit for getting a lot of this right. The style is really lifted from other influences – Anderson being the most obvious, but the dark romance is very much a Tim Burton product.Together these two elements do limit the film somewhat, and make it feel like it is trying to hit too many buttons or reference points, but yet if you are in the mood then it does work mostly. I found it quite charming for the most part and the whimsy elements were the most successful. The kung-fu and horror elements did not mix particularly well, although by this point the whimsy had charmed me more or less enough. I could very much understand why some people would hate it and others would love it. I mostly really liked it, but it is always right on the line.
