With Love and a Major Organ

A dashingly original fantasy/romance dramedy about a future where people literally trade hearts that often wanders into quirkiness for its own sake.

I’m kind of a quirky guy and I definitely enjoy quirky movies. Films that leave most others scratching their head with their weirdo premises or warped senses of humor like “Brazil” or “Lars and the Dead Girl” are decidedly my bag. God bless the misfit flicks.

Sometimes, though, it feels like a movie is wandering into relishing quirkiness for its own sake. The strangeness is supposed to be its own reward, rather than in service to a story or an enticing idea. “With Love and a Major Organ” falls into this set.

It’s set in a near-future where our current obsession with apps and always-online attention seeking has progressed to the natural stage: LifeZapp, an app that can literally run your entire life for you, including deciding who you marry.

The film’s knockout lead performance is by Anna Maguire playing Anabel, the rare woman who’s vibrantly independent and free-thinking. Working her thankless telemarketing job at an insurance company, she answers every call with an offbeat or ad-libbed greeting. She’s the hot sauce in a society of plain oatmeal.

Her real passions are painting and poetry, and falling in love. She waltzes into work (usually late) in jumpers and paint smeared on her face, frizzy blonde hair going this way and that. Her only real friend is Casey (Donna Benedicto), her next-door deskmate and an ardent devotee of LifeZapp. Casey is about to get married to a guy she barely knows after meeting on her phone.

Anabel’s mother can barely be bothered to return her calls, and soon passes away from a caved-in chest cavity where her heart used to be. It seems in this increasingly soulless existence, people will sometimes tear out their own hearts and cast them away, dying (though not immediately) from the lost organ, represented as a blowing blue light. Early on Anabel witnesses a guy at the beach pulling out his own heart and pitching it into the sea.

One day at the park Anabel spots George George (Hamza Haq), a very shy, stiff fellow who every day reads yesterday’s newspaper so he knows if anything bad was happening, it couldn’t have been too bad or there wouldn’t be today. Pretty much on her own, Anabel decides that they are destined to fall in love and begins making all sorts of extravagant gestures in that record, including recording an audio cassette (is this really the future?) in which she raves about his eyelashes and how dreamy he is.

Turns out George lives with his mother, who’s equally cut off and formal, and they share everything including even the synchronized way in which they eat dinner one bite at a time in rhythm. She has a secret about George that’s she’s never told him, but which will become important later.

Anyway, without giving too much away Anabel is crushed when George rejects her overtures and decides to rip out her own heart. Strangely, she suddenly becomes much better at her job and more considerate of Casey. Her heart winds up in George’s chest and he suddenly finds the free-spirited joy that had been Anbael’s hallmark, and runs away to enjoy his new life.

“Organ” is based on the book by Julia Lederer, who also wrote the screenplay, and it’s also been staged as a play. Director Kim Albright makes a valiant attempt to cram all this wild imagination and quirkiness into the screen, though it often feels like it can’t all fit.

Maguire is the main reason to see this movie, giving a truly zesty performance as a woman who doesn’t make very much sense, even to herself, and even after she’s given her heart up there’s enough of her old self in there to realize it was a mistake and chase after George to retrieve it.

“With Love and a Major Organ” doesn’t always work, but has its heart in the right spot, even if the pesky things have a tendency to get misplaced.